BAGHDAD: Here are details of what happened to some other toppled rulers in history.
World War Two
-- Benito Mussolini, Italian fascist dictator from 1922-1945 and his mistress Clara Petacci were executed in April 1945 by a partisan fighter while fleeing Allied forces. After Mussolini was killed, his corpse was moved to Milan and hanged upside down for public viewing alongside Petacci.
-- In Germany, days after Mussolini died, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. However, the trial of 22 other top Nazis, including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop, began on Nov. 20 1945, in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, picked because it had been a Nazi hotbed. Twelve were sentenced to death, others to long prison terms. Goering was convicted but killed himself first.
Romania
-- Following an anti-Communist uprising in the Romanian city of Timisoara, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and wife Elena were executed after a summary trial in 1989.
Former Yugoslavia
-- Slobodan Milosevic was on trial at the UN war crimes tribunal at the time of his death in March 2006. He had been charged with masterminding ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. He was also charged with war crimes in Bosnia. The former Serbian and Yugoslav president dismissed the UN war crimes tribunal as a venue for “victor's justice”.
Argentina
Leopoldo Galtieri and other junta leaders were tried for human rights crimes shortly after democracy was restored to the country in 1983. He was cleared of rights charges but jailed for his handling of the Falklands conflict and later pardoned.
Bolivia
Bolivian strong man Luis Garcia Meza was ousted in a counter-coup after 13 months of strong-arm rule. Jailed in 1995 for 30 years for genocide, torture and murder of political opponents during his 1980-81 regime.
East Germany
-- Erich Honecker fell from power in East Germany after 18 years. Extradited to Germany from Moscow, where he fled to escape manslaughter charges linked to deaths of defectors at the Berlin Wall.
The trial collapsed in 1993 due to Honecker's terminal illness. He died in exile in Chile in 1994.—Reuters
