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Victims of Iraqi Chemical Weapons Attack Testify at Genocide Trial of Dutch Businessman
Iranian victims of an alleged 1987 Iraqi chemical weapons attack testified this week in the trial of a Dutch businessman suspected of supplying precursor agents to the regime of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Nov. 28). Frans van Anraat, 63, is charged with complicity in war crimes and genocide carried out by Hussein against Kurds in Iraq and Iran. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Two witnesses yesterday described a June 1987 Iraqi chemical attack on the Iranian town of Sardasht. Kurdish day laborer Gader Molanpoor said his pregnant wife and three children were killed in the air strike. “I saw my children, they could not stand up, they were dizzy, throwing up,” he said. “They had eye problems and their skin burned … nobody dared to touch them and I had to put them in the ambulance myself,” Molanpoor said. Sardasht social worker Leila Marouf Zadeh said she saw Iraqi warplanes dropping what turned out to be nerve gas into the town, AFP reported. “In the hospital I saw many people throwing up, with red skin, they were itching and after a while they got blisters and eventually their skin turned black,” she said. Zadeh and Molanpoor said they both suffer continued health problems as a result of the chemical attack. Van Anraat is suspected of supplying Hussein with ingredients for nerve and mustard agents in the 1980s, violating export bans against Iraq. A prosecution witness testified that the businessman alone supplied Baghdad with the mustard-agent component thiodiglycol beginning in 1985. It is “the most logical to assume that from mid-1985 mustard gas used in attacks was made from ingredients supplied, among others, by van Anraat,” the expert said. A verdict in the trial is expected on Dec. 23 (Stephanie van den Berg, Agence France-Presse/IranMania, Dec. 1).
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