LAWFUEL – The Legal Newswire – AP reports that the Iraqi president raised objections Friday to the planned execution of Saddam Hussein’s former defence minister, who is due to be hanged with two other former government officials for their roles in a massacre of Kurds.
President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said former defence minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai deserved to be spared because he had been carrying out orders under threat of death by Saddam and because he had engaged in unofficial contact with the Kurdish community under the ousted regime.
Earlier this week, an Iraqi appeals court upheld the death sentences imposed against al-Tai, along with Ali Hassan al-Majid, who gained the nickname “Chemical Ali” after poison gas attacks on Kurdish towns in the 1980s, and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi Armed Forces.
