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Saddam: Cousin obliged to ask
31/07/2003 23:00 - (SA)
Baghdad - The US-led coalition said on Thursday that it is consulting with local Iraqi officials on what to do with the bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons Qusay and Uday, whom US forces killed last week in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, CNN reported.
In a letter, a second cousin of Saddam's made a burial request request to the coalition. The cousin asked L Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Iraq, to allow the bodies of Uday and Qusay to be buried in the family plot in Tikrit, Saddam's ancestral hometown.
Ezzedine Mohamed Hassan al-Majid said his wife and four children were killed in an attack led by Uday and Qusay but that he still felt obliged to make the request.
"I ask for your approval to hand over their two bodies so that they can be afforded a burial in accordance with the principles of the orthodox Islamic religion, for they are, despite what injuries they have put me and my family and the Iraqis through, nothing less than corpses," al-Majid wrote.
Empty promise
Al-Majid's father was a cousin of the former Iraqi president, but al-Majid is also a cousin of Hussein Kamil, Saddam's son-in-law, who was killed along with his brother in 1996.
In the mid-1990s, Hussein Kamil and his brother, their wives - Saddam's daughters - and their children went into exile in Jordan.
They returned to Iraq a few months later after having made public statements that led UN weapons inspectors to the discovery of Iraq's biological weapons programmmes.
Before returning, they had received assurances from Saddam that they would not be harmed, but the brothers were killed shortly after going back.
Al-Majid defected at roughly the same time but did not return to Iraq while Saddam remained in power.
Another relative, Sheikh Mohammed al-Nida, made a similar request to US military authorities.
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Several others, including tribal members, have come forward and requested the corpses, which have remained in US custody.
A representative for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority said that the matter is under consultation with the interim Iraqi Governing Council and religious and tribal leaders.
"The competent authorities would make the final decision" on how to proceed, the representative said.
Raid
Uday, 39, and Qusay, 37, were killed in a July 22 battle with US forces, along with one of their bodyguards and Qusay's 14-year-old son, Mustafa.
During the raid, US forces used anti-tank TOW missiles fired from Humvees to help destroy the building where the four were staying.
An Iraqi tipped off the forces about the two sons' whereabouts, officials have said.
The United States will pay $30m in reward money to the informant who led US forces to the two men, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Thursday, declining to disclose the identity of the informant.
- News24
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