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Saddam: 'I am not afraid of execution'
(AP)
Updated: 2005-12-06 06:56
"There were mass arrests. Women and men. Even if a child was 1-day-old, they used to tell his parents, 'Bring him with you,'" Mohammed said.
He said the agents took him and the others to the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, where they were tortured before being transferred to Abu Ghraib prison.
Mohammed said his brother, who was at 17 at the time, was tortured while his 77-year-old father watched. Interrogators threatened to rape the prisoners' daughters and sisters if the men did not sign confessions, he said.
"Some men just said `I will sign anything but leave my sisters alone,'" he said.
Ahmad Hassan Mohammed Al Dujaili cries while testifying in open court during the trial of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, Monday Dec. 5, 2005. [AP] |
Mohammed, who was 15 at the time, said he himself was tortured. "They blindfolded me, but I was so young, it kept falling." At the Baghdad detention center, he saw "a machine that looked like a grinder and had some blood and hair" on it, and "I saw bodies of people from Dujail."
The witness exchanged insults with Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother, telling him "you killed a 14-year-old boy."
"To hell," replied Ibrahim, who was intelligence chief at the time.
"You and your children go to hell," the witness replied.
The judge then asked them to avoid such exchanges.
As the testimony continued, Saddam's lawyers objected that someone in the visitors' gallery was making threatening gestures and should be removed. Ibrahim leapt to his feet, spat in the direction of the gallery, and shouted, "These are criminals."
The judge ordered the person removed from the gallery.
Mohammed, fighting back tears, described how there had been "random arrests in the streets, all the forces of the (Baath) party, and Thursday became `Judgment Day' and Dujail has become a battle front."
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