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Baath threatens attacks if Saddam executed

* Saddam calls on Iraqi Arabs, Kurds to ‘forgive, reconcile’

DUBAI: Iraq’s disbanded Baath party threatened to attack the heavily-protected “Green Zone” in Baghdad if the death sentence is carried out against its leader Saddam Hussein, in an Internet statement posted on Tuesday.

“If president Saddam Hussein is executed ... the party will reinforce its siege against the Green Zone,” which houses Iraqi government offices and the US embassy, said the party’s command on its official site. It vowed to “use all possible means to destroy embassies, as well as the headquarters of intelligence and treacherous organisations”.

“America and Iran, its ally, have detonated a bomb whose shrapnel will hit all the plotters and their agents in Iraq and outside,” said the party statement, referring to Sunday’s death sentence against the ousted president.

‘Forgive, reconcile’: Ousted dictator Saddam Hussein called on all Iraqis to “forgive, reconcile and shake hands” as he appeared in court Tuesday to face genocide charges after being condemned to death in a separate trial.

“I call on all Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds, to forgive, reconcile and shake hands,” Saddam said in the court after he questioned the day’s third witness who testified against him in the genocide trial.

Saddam brushed aside a Kurdish villager’s account on Tuesday of an alleged massacre, saying there was no proof.

On Tuesday, with a smile on his face and wearing his trademark dark business suit, a composed Saddam walked into the court and quietly took his seat, even as his defence team continued its boycott of the Kurdish genocide trial.

The chief judge in the genocide trial, Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifa, quickly opened the 21st session by summoning the day’s first Kurdish witness, Qahar Khalil Muhammad. Muhammad told the court how dozens of Iraqi Kurds, including 18 of his relatives, were gunned down by Saddam’s forces in 1988 in a northern village of Quromai.

He said an Iraqi army officer, swearing on the Quran, had assured the villagers that no harm would come to them if they surrendered and they would be offered amnesty by Saddam. Prosecutors say the Anfal campaign was a genocidal massacre of 182,000 Kurdish civilians. Saddam and his alleged henchmen insist it was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation against separatist guerrillas. afp

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