BAGHDAD — As Saddam Hussein and other key defendants boycotted their trial, two women testified Wednesday that the former dictator's intelligence chief had supervised and taken part in torture sessions where they were stripped naked, given electric shocks, hung from the ceiling and beaten.
The accounts were the most chilling so far in court proceedings in which the defendants' tirades have often overshadowed the victims of their alleged crimes. It was the most damaging testimony yet against Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, who is Hussein's half brother, in the courtroom drama that began in October.
One woman said Hasan had subjected her to a mock execution, firing a pistol near her head before beating her unconscious with it. The other woman said the intelligence chief had kicked her in the chest, breaking a rib. Both described their humiliation in rapid speech and high-pitched voices, seated behind a curtain to hide their identities.
"The torture was one-fourth of the suffering," the first woman recalled, her voice choking over events nearly 25 years ago. "The undressing was the other three-fourths."
Hussein, Hasan, three of the other six defendants and the entire team of defense lawyers refused to show up for the session in protest against what they consider bias by the new chief judge.
In his first session as the head jurist Sunday, Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman ousted Hasan and a defense lawyer for shouting, triggering a walkout by the other lawyers, Hussein, former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Awad Hamed Bandar, former head of the Revolutionary Court.
Of the remaining four defendants, lesser-known former Baath Party officials, one joined the boycott and remained in his cell as the trial resumed Wednesday after a two-day recess. Six court-appointed attorneys stood in for the defense team.
Hussein's lead attorney, Khalil Dulaimi, said the boycott would continue unless the judge was removed from the bench. Dulaimi called him "an enemy to my client," noting that Abdel Rahman had been imprisoned during Hussein's rule for membership in an outlawed Kurdish nationalist movement.
The defendants are charged in the killings of more than 140 men and boys from Dujayl, a predominantly Shiite Muslim village, in collective punishment for a 1982 assassination attempt there against Hussein. The trial is the first of many planned for Hussein by the tribunal set up after his U.S.-led ouster in 2003.
