/ 31 May 2006

Saddam trial: Defence accuses witness of perjury

Saddam Hussein’s defence team has accused a prosecution witness of perjury and on Wednesday demanded that the court be halted to allow an investigation into the veracity of all those the prosecution has brought to the stand during the seven-month trial.

The accusation came after the defence showed a DVD in court, claiming it showed Ali al-Haidari contradicting the testimony he gave in December about a crackdown against Shi’ites launched by Saddam’s regime following an attack on the then-Iraqi leader in 1982 in Dujail.

Al-Haidari testified that he was arrested at age 14 in the Dujail sweep and was tortured with electrical shocks and beatings.

One of the videos, shown in court on Wednesday, included footage of his testimony, in which he insisted there was no shooting attack on Saddam in Dujail on July 8 1982 — only celebratory shooting to mark the former Iraqi leader’s visit.

The DVD then shows al-Haidari addressing a 2004 ceremony in Dujail and praising the attack on Saddam as an attempt by ”sons of Dujail … to kill the greatest tyrant in modern history”.

”He’s saying something totally different in this tape, contradicting his testimony,” defence lawyer Ziyad al-Najdawi told the court. ”This is considered a crime of perjury, and we ask that he be investigated for perjury.

”Now that it’s been proven that the second witness has given an untrue testimony, we ask that the trial proceedings be stopped to allow for an investigation into the veracity of the other prosecution testimony,” he said.

Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi said al-Haidari’s speech at the ceremony was irrelevant. ”The important thing is his statement that took place before the court under oath. Statements outside the court have no significance. That is customary practice in any justice system,” he said.

On Tuesday, a defence witness alleged that al-Moussawi also attended the 2004 Dujail ceremony, claiming that this proved the prosecutor was biased and knew al-Haidari’s testimony was false. In the video, a man who resembles al-Moussawi was shown talking to participants at the ceremony — though the defence did not repeat the charge that it was him on Wednesday.

In court, al-Moussawi said the man in the video was not him, but rather someone who resembles him — one of the ceremony’s organisers, Abdul-Aziz Mohammed Bandar.

Chief Judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman called a 10-minute recess after the DVD was shown. When he returned he did not rule on the defence’s request.

After the recess, Bandar was brought into court and said he was the man in the video. He closely resembles al-Moussawi.

Saddam and his co-defendants face possible execution by hanging if convicted on the charges. They are accused of arresting hundreds of Dujail families in a crackdown, torturing and killing women and children and killing 148 Shi’ites who were sentenced to death for the assassination attempt.

The perjury allegation came as the defence — now in its fourth week of presenting its case — tried to throw doubt on the foundations of the prosecution case.

A witness on Tuesday claimed that 23 of the 148 Shi’ites sentenced to death by Saddam’s regime were still alive and that he had met some of them in Dujail recently.

Abdel-Rahman ordered an investigation into the witness’s claim.

But defence lawyer Mohammed Munib argued that that basic elements of the case against Saddam and his co-defendants had been thrown into doubt and that the entire discovery process in the cast should be re-done and all the prosecution witnesses reviewed.

”The court must re-open the doors of the investigations [into the Dujail case] and re-call all the prosecution witnesses,” Munib said. ”What we have seen has affected the basic evidence on which the prosecution has depended.”

The defence aired a second DVD on Wednesday, aiming to support its contention that the razing of farmlands in Dujail that took place during the crackdown was not a retaliation against its residents for the attack on Saddam. The defence has said it was part of a programme to rebuild and modernise Dujail.

The video showed Saddam giving a speech in Dujail, declaring that ”now” that the farmlands were destroyed, ”we have a lot of land and can let everyone from Dujail have a house”.

”They wanted land to build on and live in, but we were not able to before because of the nature of the land,” Saddam said, speaking from a balcony as a crowd below cheered. The defence said it did not know the exact date when the speech took place. — Sapa-AP