Witness 'lashed with cables'

2005-12-06 16:17

Baghdad - Known only as "Witness A", a Shi'ite woman gave chilling testimony on Tuesday of how she was jailed for four years and beaten by intelligence agents at the mesmerising trial of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Speaking with her voice disguised and sitting behind a heavy beige curtain, to protect her identity from journalists in the press box, her testimony got off to a tearful start as she recalled events in the early 1980s.

Aged 16 when she was rounded up by Saddam's forces in the Shi'ite village of Dujail, she said she was taken first to intelligence headquarters before being flung into Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

"My youth ... was destroyed," said the woman. Today she described herself as a housewife.

Saddam is on trial with seven henchmen for the massacre of 148 people from the Shi'ite village of Dujail in 1982.

He and his seven deputies face the death penalty by hanging if convicted over the killings.

Taken to an operation room at intelligence headquarters, the woman said a man ordered her to remove her clothes before pistol whipping her and lashing her with cables. In all six witnesses were to testify on Tuesday.

"He said take off your clothes. He hit me with the pistol and I was forced to take off my clothes and he lifted my legs upward and he hit me with cables and asked me to talk," she was translated as saying.

Just metres away on the other side of the court room, relayed television footage showed a silent Saddam sitting in the dock, his eyes blinking.

'Men were forced to strip naked'

"They lifted my legs upwards and they tied my hands and they would beat me with cables and hit me with electric shocks - how can you describe that?" said the witness at a later point.

"I cannot describe what was there," she said of her time in Abu Ghraib, where she recalled how men were forced to strip naked and run in front of women.

In at times confused testimony in which she repeatedly invoked God, she said that at least three of her toenails fell off because she was forced to walk in the desert.

Presiding judge Rizkar Mohammed Amin repeatedly asked her not to deviate from the topic and relate her evidence directly to Saddam.

"Your honour he is the president of the country, he is the protector of the people, when the people are tortured and imprisoned, who ordered that?" she said at one such prompting.

Amin at one point said her evidence was different from in December 2004 and asked to know why but she gave no answer.

She was cross-examined by both the prosecution and defence, who wanted to see the woman face-to-face. The proceedings were then closed off to journalists and the heavy curtain pushed to one side.

A defence lawyer asked her if she had had her photo taken at Abu Ghraib, in an apparent reference to photos that emerged during last year's US military prison abuse scandal of Iraqi detainees at the same prison. She replied "No".

After a recess for lunch, another woman, "Witness B", began to give evidence to the court.

- AFP