'Chemical Ali' hanged in Iraq

BAGHDAD (AFP) Saddam Husseins notorious henchman Chemical Ali was executed on Monday, an Iraqi government spokesman said, a sentence carried out around a week after he received a fourth death sentence.
The condemned Ali Hass-an al-Majid has been executed by hanging until death today, said spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh in a statement.
On January 17, Saddams cousin Majid was sentenced to death for ordering the gassing of Kurds in the northeastern town of Halabja, one of the worst atrocities of late dictator Saddam Husseins regime that killed an estimated 5,000 people. Three-quarters of the victims at Halabja were women and children, in what is thought to be the deadliest ever gas attack carried out against civilians. The conviction for the gas attack that came as the Iran-Iraq war drew to a close in 1988 was the fourth time that Majid, better known by his macabre nickname, has received a death sentence.
Handing down the ruling, Judge Abud Mustapha al-Hamani branded Majids offences as deliberate murder, a crime against humanity when the verdict was delivered amid muffled applause in the courtroom. Al hamdulillah, Al hamdulillah (praise be to God), said a stone-faced Majid, in a hearing broadcast on television. Majids execution had previously been held up by legal wrangling.
He had already been sentenced to hang for genocide over the Kurdish offensives when in December 2008 he received a second death sentence for war crimes committed during the ill-fated 1991 Shia uprising in southern Iraq. Last March, the Iraqi High Tribunal handed down a third death sentence over the 1999 murders of dozens of Shias in the Sadr City district of Baghdad and in the central shrine city of Najaf.