Posted on 04/24/2003 6:24:11 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
The Hussein ally reportedly died in a raid in Basra. Hospital workers say he was in Baghdad days later.
By Juan O. Tamayo, Knight Ridder News Service
BAGHDAD - Hospital workers say they saw the infamous Saddam Hussein henchman known as "Chemical Ali" alive in Baghdad just before the city fell, contradicting British army reports that he had been killed in an air raid on a house in the southern city of Basra days earlier.
The eyewitness reports that Ali Hassan al-Majid, who ordered poison-gas attacks on Kurdish villages in 1988 that killed 5,000 civilians, was at the Baghdad Nursing Hospital on April 6 or 7 is an indication of how little is known about the whereabouts of Hussein's inner circle, both during the war and now.
Many of the 55 most-wanted figures of the regime, displayed on playing cards distributed by the American military, seem to have vanished. Eleven reportedly are in U.S. custody. Three are believed to have been killed.
Majid, who is the king of spades in the U.S. deck, was reported killed in air raids, first on March 22 and then again April 5.
But two workers at the nursing hospital, an elite 250-bed facility that is part of the huge Saddam Hospital complex, said a healthy Majid turned up at the hospital after the April 5 air attack.
"Of course I was very, very surprised to see him, because the radio said he was killed," said a nurse at the hospital, who asked that his name not be used.
Dr. Abdel Azziz al-Bayaah, the hospital's director, said Majid, Defense Minister Sultan Hashem Ahmed, an Iraqi bodyguard, and about 10 non-Iraqi gunmen left the hospital the morning of April 6 or 7 after spending the night while doctors treated Ahmed and the Iraqi bodyguard.
Bayaah said the hospital's staff had no choice but to be host to the group. "You know the position in which we are," he said.
Majid and his entourage arrived at the hospital between 7 and 8 p.m. "two or three days before Baghdad fell" on April 9, said the nurse, who treated the bodyguard.
Majid, wearing his spinach-green army general's uniform but no name tag, identified himself and called the bodyguard "one of his dearest friends," the nurse said.
"Don't worry. Baghdad will not fall. We are powerful and we are everywhere," the nurse quoted Majid as telling the hospital's staff.
The guard had light glass shrapnel wounds on his face and chest, and during his brief treatment said the group had been driving around the city when another car drove up and shot at them, the nurse added.
One of the non-Iraqi guards also was wounded, in the buttocks, but was embarrassed and refused treatment, the nurse said. He believed the non-Iraqis to be Syrian Islamic radicals because of their accents, civilian clothes and long beards.
The nurse said Majid's entourage spent the night in the makeshift emergency room the hospital had prepared on the first floor for war casualties, and was gone when he returned to the ward after breakfast about 10:30 a.m.
The nurse said he was later told that Majid had driven up in "common cars" - not the luxury vehicles usually issued to top regime leaders - paid "a lot of money" to Bayaah and a Health Ministry official, Dr. Munnah Ibrahim, to keep quiet about his stay, and then left, a changed man, the next morning.
"At night he seemed powerful and self-assured. But the other nurses told me that by morning he seemed broken. He changed to [traditional] Arab clothes, shaved off his mustache, and escaped in ambulances."
Nonsense, Bayaah said. Majid was still wearing his uniform and mustache when Bayaah accompanied the entourage to its Japanese-made sedans and pickup trucks that morning, Bayaah said.
Only Ahmed left in an ambulance. Bayaah said that was because recent brain surgery had left the defense minister with intense vertigo and headaches.
Asked about the money that Majid allegedly paid him and Ibrahim, Bayaah said: "I have nothing to do with that money." Staffers at Ibrahim's nearby office said she had not shown up at work for two days.
Majid hosted a meeting in a hospital conference room before he left, another nurse said, and left behind a military map of Baghdad, marked "secret" and with several pinholes clustered around the northern part of the city.
Handwritten along the top of the map were the words Al Tarmiya and Al Mishahde, two predominantly Sunni Muslim suburbs north of the capital known to be centers of support for Hussein.
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