US captures poison-gas killer 'Chemical Ali'

IRAQ: US Central Command yesterday announced the capture of Gen Ali Hassan al-Majid, fifth on the US list of "most wanted" members of the ousted Iraqi regime.

Gen al-Majid, a cousin of ousted president Saddam Hussein and a member of his inner circle, was nicknamed "Chemical Ali" for ordering a poison-gas attack which killed 5,000 Kurds at the village of Halabja in 1988. He was the King of Spades in the US pack of cards depicting fugitives.

His capture, and the detention earlier this week of Saddam's vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, will fuel US hopes that its forces are closing in on Saddam himself.

On April 7th, British forces announced that Gen al-Majid had died during a US air attack on his villa in Basra. A body found in the ruins was identified as his, but later reports suggested he was still alive.

Entrusted with the defence of the southern part of the country during the Anglo-US campaign, Gen al-Majid was credited with the credible resistance put up by regular army troops and Saddam Fedayeen guerrillas in the British sector.

Born near Tikrit, north of Baghdad, in 1938, Gen al-Majid was the son of Saddam Hussein's paternal uncle, a peasant from the Abu Nasir tribe. As a youth, he joined the army, rising from warrant officer to general and minister of defence.

When the Baath party fell from power in 1963, Saddam Hussein, charged with reorganising its underground structures, recruited his cousin as his "hatchet man". When the party staged a successful coup in 1968, Gen al-Majid assumed key party and military posts. When Saddam Hussein became president in 1979, Gen al-Majid participated in a purge of the party. During the 1980-88 war with Iran, Gen al-Majid was put in charge of rooting out disloyal Kurds and Shias. He presided over the brutal Anfal Operation for transferring rebellious Kurds from the northern mountains along the Iranian border to the hinterland. Some 50-55,000 Kurds died during this campaign. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Gen al-Majid became its governor. After the war, he was appointed minister of interior, and put in charge of suppressing the Shia and Kurdish rebellions.Some 30,000 people went missing at this time.

While Iraqis suffered under the crippling sanctions regime, the general was accused of enriching himself and was dismissed as defence minister. In 1996, he helped organise the murder of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel, who had defected to Jordan. Gen al-Majid was named co-ordinator of both the regime's intelligence services and the party apparatus in the south and centre of the country.

His captors hope he will provide information on the whereabouts of the former president, and on what has happened to his weapons of mass destruction. Gen al-Majid is the second on the US list arrested this week.

Taha Yassin Ramadan, number 20, was seized in Mosul on Tuesday.