BAGHDAD, Nov 28: A defiant Saddam Hussein on Monday exchanged angry words with the presiding judge and heard testimony from the first prosecution witness as the trial of the former Iraqi president resumed after a 40-day break. Saddam, who faces charges including murder and torture that carry the death penalty, showed no sign of toning down the combative stance he adopted at the first hearing in October.
Iraq’s one-time strongman and his seven co-defendants, who all pleaded not guilty to charges over a 1982 massacre of Shias, also watched video testimony from a witness who gave evidence from his prison hospital before his death.
Dressed in a smart Western suit with a white handkerchief neatly folded into the top pocket, Saddam engaged in an angry opening skirmish with judge Rizkar Mohammed Amin over his treatment at the high-security Baghdad courthouse.
The deposed dictator complained he had been forced to walk the stairs into the courtroom as the lift was broken and had been put in handcuffs on the way to the court, making it hard for him to carry a copy of the Koran.
He then lambasted the court for apparently confiscating his pen and paper, saying: “How can a defendant defend himself if they take even his papers and pen?”
The Kurdish Amin — who as in the first hearing appeared unflappable in the face of Saddam’s verbal jousts — promised the paper and pen back would be returned later on.
Saddam did not shy away from an angry tirade against the court’s US guards. “Please judge, I don’t want you to tell them, order them. You are Iraqi, you have sovereignty, they are in your country, they are foreigners, they are invaders.”
The charges relate to the killing of 148 men and youths from the Shia village of Dujail, north of the capital.
The other defendants include Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother and a former director of the feared Mukhabarat intelligence service, and former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan, one of the regime’s “enforcers.”
