Baghdad, Iraq – The first witnesses took the stand Monday in Saddam Hussein’s trial, offering gripping accounts of meat grinders used on human flesh, torture with fire and electric shocks, and mass executions.
The courtroom soon devolved into a wild scene of shouting and chaos as Hussein and his fellow defendants exchanged insults with witnesses, lectured the judge and veered into lengthy diatribes against the tribunal.
“Don’t interrupt me!” Hussein shouted at the judge, who tried with little success to make the former Iraqi president stick to questioning the witnesses.
Later, Hussein pounded on the lectern and his microphone, comparing himself to Italy’s Benito Mussolini and insisting that he was “not afraid to be executed.”
The outbursts punctuated an extraordinary eight-hour session in which Hussein faced victims of his government’s massacres in court for the first time.
The first witness, Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, 38, riveted the courtroom with the scenes of torture he had witnessed after his arrest in 1982, including seeing a meat grinder with human hair and blood beneath it.
Standing 10 feet from Hussein, he described Baath Party officials hurling a young boy out a window to his death. At one point, Muhammad briefly broke down in tears as he recalled how his brother was tortured with electrical shocks in front of their 77-year-old father.
“There were mass arrests of men and women and children,” Muhammad said.
When their turn came to question the witnesses, Hussein and his associates showed no trace of remorse. The former rulers spoke instead of their own suffering in prison and railed at length against the court and witnesses for daring to challenge them. The theatrics by Hussein and his half brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, threatened at times to undermine the gravity of the trial.
The testimony, coming after weeks of delays and procedural arguments, offered a dramatic first glimpse of the evidence against Hussein and seven others. They are charged with committing crimes against humanity in the torture and killing of 148 Shiite men and teenage boys in Dujayl, north of Baghdad, after an assassination attempt there against Hussein in 1982.
The trial is to resume Wednesday.
