A GRAVE holding 30 bodies has been found in the garden of an opulent villa where sadistic parties are said to have been hosted by the Iraqi general known as Chemical Ali, writes Adam Nathan. Police who found the grave say General Ali Hassan alMajid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein who got his nickname from the gas attacks he mounted on the Kurds of northern Iraq, used to entertain house guests with a "party game" that involved shooting prisoners tied to metal posts in the garden.Major Jasin Hamed Taleb, 43, a police intelligence officer, said local farmers had witnessed several such killings and had shown him a site in the garden where they had seen bodies being buried. "We had not noticed the site and it was not until you were on it that you could smell the bodies," he said.
Photographs of the mass grave have been sent to prosecutors in Baghdad to be used as evidence in al-Majid's trial, which is expected to begin in May. Iraqi sources in Baghdad said the former general would face charges in connection with the suppression of the Shi'ite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991 as well as the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja, in the north, in 1988.
It has emerged that tapes of al-Majid threatening in his distinctive high-pitched voice to cut up his victims "like cucumbers" are likely to be broadcast in court. The tapes, which record al-Majid's foul-mouthed tirades at Ba'ath party meetings, are part of a large body of evidence handed to prosecutors. Al-Majid, number two in America's pack of cards depicting the most-wanted members of Saddam's regime, is heard vowing to swamp Kurdish villages with clouds of poison gas. He says so many will die that troops will have to "bury them with bulldozers".