11.45am
DUBAI - Saddam Hussein's sister said on Monday her brother would never have surrendered meekly and that US forces must have used drugs or gas to paralyse him.
"Saddam Hussein, hero of Arabs, would never surrender like this. He must have been subjected to drugs or nerve gas to paralyse him, for he is not one to surrender in this humiliating manner," Nawal Ibrahim al-Hasan told London-based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi by telephone from an unidentified Arab capital.
The 66-year-old former Iraqi dictator was caught on Saturday in a pit hideout near his northern Iraqi home town of Tikrit without firing a shot. Saddam was later shown by video submitting to medical exams at the hands of US soldiers.
"Is it possible for a president to be humiliated like this and for the Americans to comb through his hair for nits?" al-Hasan said in the interview, to be published in the Arabic-language daily's Tuesday edition.
"This is not the Saddam Hussein we know. He must have been drugged or injected with illegal chemicals. What happened is an insult to all Arabs and Muslims," the paper quoted her as saying as she wept.
Al-Hasan said Arab leaders should ensure that her brother had a fair trial in an international court and not in Iraq.
The US-backed Iraqi Governing Council said Saddam would go on trial facing a possible death penalty for his three decades of ruthless rule. US President George W Bush said it was up to Iraqis to decide his fate provided the court hearing was fair.
"Saddam Hussein was a desert fighter resisting the occupation of his country, and therefore Arabs and Iraqis must ...defend him and guarantee that he is treated well and tried fairly," al-Hasan said.
"The Iraqi resistance to occupation will continue and will escalate after his arrest because resistance is the only way and there can be no cooperation with occupation and occupying powers," she added.
Al-Hasan said her husband Arshad Yassin, one of Saddam's special bodyguards, had also been arrested by US forces.
An Iraqi official who met Saddam after his arrest said today the former president is a broken man, apparently seeking the mercy of his captors to protect him from his own people.
"I found a very broken man. He was, I think, psychologically ruined and very demoralised. His body language showed that he was very miserable," said Muwaffaq al-Rubaiye, who met Saddam yesterday with Iraq's US governor Paul Bremer and Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US soldier in Iraq.
Rubaiye and other members of Iraq's Governing Council met Saddam for 30 minutes.
"When we were asking him difficult questions and throwing accusations, reminding him of his crimes, he was looking at Ambassador Bremer and General Sanchez, as if he was asking the Americans to protect him," Rubaiye told Reuters.
"He felt safer with the Americans. I think that indicates that probably he is cooperating with the Americans."
Rubaiye denied reports Saddam's US captors had moved him abroad, saying he was still in Iraq and would stay to become the first defendant in a new Iraqi court set up to try members of his deposed government for crimes against humanity and genocide.
"I can tell you he will not leave Iraq, he will be tried in Iraq, he will be sentenced in Iraq, and he will serve his sentence in Iraq," he said, adding he expected to see the deposed strongman face the court "within weeks".
Human rights groups have said Iraq lacks the judges, lawyers and institutions to conduct fair trials without international guidance, but Rubaiye said the court would prove its fairness through Saddam's trial.
"This tribunal is going to follow all international legal standards, it's going to observe and be monitored by human rights standards. He's going to have the right of defence," he said.
Rubaiye was certain Saddam would be convicted of crimes including a campaign of genocide against Iraq's Kurds and war crimes stemming from the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, partly because he showed no remorse for his actions.
"He has absolutely no remorse toward the crimes he has committed against the Iraqi people. The man is unrepentant, he's pure evil," he said, citing Saddam's answer when asked why he invaded Kuwait in 1990, sparking the first Gulf War and more than a decade of crippling economic sanctions.
"He was saying that 'When I came in the Iraqi people were barefoot and hungry. I fed them and bought them slippers'," Rubaiye said.
- REUTERS
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Saddam must have been drugged, sister says
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