BAGHDAD
Iraq’s supreme criminal court sentenced former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz to death on Tuesday, the first death sentence handed down against the long-time international face of the Saddam Hussein regime.
“The supreme criminal court issued an execution order against Tareq Aziz for his role in eliminating religious parties,” state television reported. It said that the court also ordered death sentences against two other top Saddam lieutenants, former interior minister Saadoun Shaker and Abid Hamoud, the executed dictator’s secretary.
All three were sentenced for their role in a crackdown on Shiites, which followed a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in Dujail, a mainly Shiite town north of Baghdad, the court’s spokesman Mohammed Abdul Saheb said.
“The order was for the crackdown on religious parties which took place in the 1980s,” Abdul Saheb told AFP. There was another bigger crackdown against Iraq’s Shiite majority community following a 1991 uprising against Saddam.
By law, the death sentences have to be confirmed by the presidential council before being carried out. Aziz’s Jordan-based son Ziad told AFP that the death sentence against his father proved the revelations made about the Iraqi state by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
“The decision was an act of revenge against anybody and anything related to the past,” he said. “It proves the credibility of the information published by WikiLeaks…This verdict is a disgrace,” said Ziad, who has lived in Amman with his family since 2003.
