In the first trial involving the mass killing of Iraqi Kurds with chemical weapons, a Dutch court on Friday sentenced a supplier of the weapon ingredients to 15 years in jail.
The judges convicted Frans van Anraat, 63, a Dutch businessman, of complicity in war crimes because they said he had known that the materials he sold to Iraq during the rule of former president Saddam Hussein could be used to make lethal poison gas.
The court acquitted him of complicity in genocide, because it said it could not be proved that he knew that the chemicals would be used for genocide. The raw materials were sent to Iraq before they were used in the mass attack against Kurdish villagers, the court said.
PHOTO: EPA
Van Anraat received the maximum sentence for complicity in war crimes. But the judges' decision said that "the crimes are of such a grave nature that even the maximum sentence cannot do them justice."
A group of Kurds, some of whom had joined the lawsuit as relatives of victims, applauded in court when the sentence was handed down, and several dozen others played music and danced outside the courthouse in The Hague afterward, witnesses said.
Lawyers involved in the monthlong trial said it was the first time a court had ruled that the attack by Saddam's troops on the town of Halabja in 1988 was genocide. The attack, which was part of a broader campaign against Iraqi Kurds, killed more than 5,000 people in a single day, while blinding and maiming many others.
The massacre also forms part of the charges brought against Saddam, who is now on trial in Baghdad in connection with a different large-scale killing.
Van Anraat's case is also the first in which a supplier of potentially harmful ingredients had been charged with genocide and convicted in connection with war crimes under a new mix of national and international law. In the past, the delivery of goods like the chemicals that van Anraat sold to Iraq despite export bans would probably have been dealt with as an economic crime, said Heikelina Verrijn-Stuart, a Dutch specialist in international law.
"This sends an important signal to suppliers and traders," she said.
"It says that they, too, can be prosecuted and held accountable for war crimes," she added.
The indictment of van Anraat said he had used a Panamanian company based in Switzerland to try to cover up his dealings with Iraq.
The indictment said the chemicals could be used as ingredients in mustard and nerve gases, which eventually were used against the Kurdish population in Iraq and during Iraq's war against Iran in the 1980s.
Prosecutors said van Anraat, acting as a middleman, had used schemes to ship the chemicals from Japanese producers via countries including Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Singapore. He sent them under labels like "flame retardants."
During the trial, he admitted to selling the goods, but maintained that he thought they would be used in the textile industry. Several witnesses, including a Japanese business associate of van Anraat, testified that he knew of the materials' potentially lethal use.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS