Kurd tells Saddam genocide trial of killings
A Kurd who lives in the United States today testified how, as a 12-year-old boy, he survived a firing squad in which Saddam Hussein's soldiers shot dead his mother and three sisters.
"There was a trench. We were lined up. A soldier shot directly at us. I was hit on my shoulder," Taimor Abdallah Rokhzai, a 30-year-old Iraqi, told the trial of Saddam Hussein and six former members of his regime, which resumed today after a 19-day break.
Saddam and his co-defendants pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from their role in a military crackdown on Iraq's Kurd population in 1987-88.
"The soldier kept firing at us. I saw my mother's headscarf fall, my sisters and relatives were bleeding and then they all died," Rokhzai told the court.
Saddam and his co-defendants sat quietly during the testimony. Rokhzai, who now lives in Washington, said that during the shooting, "I begged the soldier 'We are women and children. Why are you shooting us?"'
He did not say how the soldier reacted.
"I saw bullets hitting a woman's head and her brain coming out, I saw a pregnant woman shot and killed. It was horrible," he said.
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