by Kanan Makiya
“What! You did not know who Sayyid Majid was!”
“No, I didn’t. Of course I knew his father, Sayyid Abu’l Qassim al-Khoei; he was our Grand Ayatollah, our Supreme Source of Emulation; we were all his followers in my family from when I was a child until his death in 1992. But I had never heard the name of his son mentioned before the witness in the governor’s case brought it up.”
“What did you do?”
“As soon as the witness said this, I stopped everything, and asked everyone in the room to leave except the witness. The Americans, their translator, the policemen, and my assistants who were taking down the deposition all filed out and waited in an anteroom. Once the door was closed and there were only the two of us in the room, I looked the young man straight in the eye, and told him to forget the deposition and tell me what he was talking about. I asked him to speak to me personally, off the record, with no tape recorders or stenographers present.”
“So you realized something important had happened?”
“Not just important, my friend, earth-shattering! This witness gave me my first account of the whole story…He started with Sayyid Majid’s return to Najaf and ended with the killing itself, which he was, however, not directly a witness to. But he gave me a list of names of people who had been there who could corroborate his story. After he had finished, I asked the others to return to the room. And we returned to the facts of the original case concerning the corruption of the governor.”
“How did you proceed from there?”
“Well, now I had two cases folded into one. I had the story of a murder wrapped up in a story of corruption. I had to separate the two. Further investigation showed the corruption case had nothing to do with the murder of Sayyid Majid—the governor, it turned out, had not deliberately let people out; the prison walls themselves were broken into, and they escaped. So the next thing I did was open a new file on the case of the murder of Sayyid Majid. That was the beginning of the whole affair.”
“And the governor issue?”
“It went ahead, and he was eventually imprisoned for fifteen years. To the best of my knowledge he is still in prison.”
“And the new case concerning Sayyid Majid?”
“One witness led me to another, and the first big discovery was that three people had been killed, not one. A man called the Kelidar, the keeper of the keys of the Shrine, and another man I later found out was from Diwaniyya named Majid. Five or six others had been seriously wounded. I looked into our files for case notes of some sort, an old file, anything. There was nothing. I called the chief of police. He said he heard something had happened on April 10, but he did not investigate; times were chaotic and no one knew what was going on. He did not even know if he still had a job; then he added that it was a ‘very sensitive’ case and he had been advised to steer clear of it. Sensitive? What does that mean? I asked him about the corpses. Where were they? Who had buried them? Had autopsy reports been filed?”
“What a mess…Had autopsy reports been filed?”
“Perfunctory ones. There were no case notes to speak of.”
“And the bodies?”
“They had been buried by ‘people,’ I was told. I soon found out they were members of the victims’ families. So I searched them out and took their statements. I asked them if they wanted to press charges—they all did, but some were afraid. I got their permission in writing to exhume the bodies for proper fresh autopsies for purposes of an investigation into the incident.”
“Where was Sayyid Majid buried?”
“A distant family relation said Sayyid Majid had been buried in the Green Mosque, inside the Shrine of Imam ‘Ali, Peace Be Upon Him, next to his father, Abu’l Qassim, and his brother, Sayyid Taqi, killed by Saddam in a fake traffic accident shortly after Sayyid Majid escaped. And that is where we found his grave—all three of them lying side by side, opposite the tomb of the Imam, God’s Prayers Be Upon Him.”
“You had the authority to exhume in this holiest of all holy places? How can that be! I don’t believe it.”
“Technically, under Saddam’s laws, yes, I had the legal authority. But I did not presume to exhume the body on that basis alone. You have to understand there were great difficulties with the place of burial, beginning with the sensitivity of its location, followed by the awkward fact that the Green Mosque itself was a short distance away from the Sayyid’s house, and the scene of the crime. There were, in other words, spiritual, social, and, most important, security dimensions to the issue of removing Sayyid Majid’s corpse for autopsy. This was not an ordinary exhumation.”
“So what did you do?”
“I asked for permission from the office of the Grand Ayatollah himself, God bless him. He replied in his letter to our office, which is also on file, that if an autopsy would help ‘reveal the truth,’ his phrase, then it had his full support. This is finally what made exhumation of Sayyid Majid’s body possible.”
“All that is in the file?”
“It is…as is the paperwork of the new autopsy, following what must be one of the most thorough and comprehensive autopsies I have seen in all my years as an investigating judge.”
“What did the autopsy report conclude?”
“It confirmed to a remarkable extent the things said by the thirty or so witnesses from whom I had obtained depositions. There was an astonishing near one hundred percent conformity between what the autopsy showed and what the witnesses said. The knife wounds, how his hands had been tied, the cutting off of one of his fingers, the broken jawbone, the innumerable cuts all over the body. The knife wounds were varied, some deep, some slight, some fatal, others not.”
“I did not know a finger had been cut off. Were the Americans in the picture?”
“Barely…One never saw them in Najaf in those days. I did inform the liaison officer that Sayyid Majid’s body was going to be exhumed. Bremer still had not been appointed.”
“I am surprised you were so fearless in pursuit of this case.”
“I was naive at the outset, never really having concerned myself with clerical intrigues in the past. They are a staple of our city, but I had my eyes on a career in Baghdad. You could say I fell into a swamp, because I did not know where I was going. And then it was too late. Once you start a thing like this, there is no going back. You have to go where the evidence takes you. Also, I believed in my profession. Contrary to what the Americans thought when they first arrived, there was a real legal system and competent judges and courts—not everything was tainted by politics. The Americans came with this ridiculous notion that all judges were corrupt Baʻthis serving the interests of the party. That is plain ignorance. To be sure there were political courts, and Baʻthi political appointees, and political trials and political prisoners. All that is true. But they accounted for a tiny percentage of the entire legal system. In the meantime, there were still robberies and nonpolitical crimes of every sort and description to contend with. I was part of that system. And I was ambitious and young, aspiring to be an important judge one day.”
“Did no one put pressure on you to drop the case?”
“My friends in the police and courts advised me to drop the investigation…They said it was dangerous for me personally and my family. They said the House of Sadr was involved, and implicating them could set off an avalanche of unpredictable consequences. But the strange thing is, the more they warned me off, the more I wanted to know what happened. Only after I opened a file and took up the case, after I had deposed more than thirty witnesses, when it was too late to back down, did it become positively dangerous for me to continue. But by then it was too late. I had to see the case through to the bitter end.”
“Why dangerous?”
“There were two attempts on my life. The first, a bomb placed outside my office window, which the police defused. The second, an ambush of my car from afar, using a rocket-propelled grenade, which missed.”
“When was the first time you heard of the House of Sadr’s involv
ement?”
“Virtually all the witnesses mentioned it. The aged mother of the Kelidar accused them directly, and asked for her son’s blood to be avenged. She wanted to bring murder charges herself against the Sayyid. She was too frail to come to court so I deposed her at her house. She could attest to the fact that Sayyid Majid had dropped by, and left the house with her son to go to his office in the Shrine. Then the Kelidar’s sister, a most respected highly qualified doctor in the city, also filed a case. Of course, neither had any direct proof the Sayyid was implicated. Over time, however, the families withdrew from the case. I believe they grew afraid or were warned to back off.”
“What happened next?”
“I visited the site of the killings, saw all the evidence of bullets and dried blood, had it all photographed and cataloged. We found bullet casings and two of the knives used in the stabbings. Everything is in the file.”
“Weren’t your colleagues in the coroner’s office, in the court administration, and in the police afraid?”
“Very much so, but the chief of the court always stood by me and wanted the investigation to go all the way. I had one investigator who also would not be deterred, and the police, to be honest, were by and large excellent. Very professional. They were all the old police; no new appointments had been made.”
“Tell me about the witnesses.”
“They lie at the heart of the case. The initial net I cast led us to an outer circle of about fifty names. These were people who were at the scene, potential witnesses of one sort or another. Gradually we winnowed this number down to around twenty very crucial witnesses, among whom two were decisive because they had been as close to the murder as I am to you in this room. Moreover, their testimonies confirmed one another and established in no uncertain terms who ordered the killing and who delivered the fatal wound.”
“What about arrests? Did you arrest anybody?”
“We started arresting early in July, right after the first attempt on my life in June. The end of my involvement in the whole case was in August, when Bremer, who had finally shown up, assigned me to Baghdad. All in all, just over thirty depositions are in the final file. Arrest warrants were issued for everyone whose involvement had come up in the depositions, including unwilling witnesses. Many of those we arrested immediately began to confess. We have their statements. The moment they were brought into the police station for a preliminary hearing, the words started to pour out of them, implicating more and more people. We continued arresting and getting more confessions. It became clear that the crowd milling about in the courtyard of the Shrine, outside the Kelidar’s room, had been a strange mix, some individuals with light criminal backgrounds like robbery, but also some who’d committed murder. Young men with no ideology, no profession even, who had nothing personal against Sayyid Majid, only they had police records. Then there were ordinary citizens who got caught up in the melee. We let them go right away. Most important were a number of key personnel from the office of the Sayyid, who seem to have been giving the orders and running the show. But even these individuals started to confess, some of them telling the story in great detail, how Sayyid Majid had been captured, then tied up, who gave the orders, and what exactly was said.”
“They tied him up?”
“Yes, with his hands behind his back, after which the rope was wound around his torso several times. He was left completely defenseless. I found that strange, so I asked who gave the orders to tie his hands. The witnesses all said it was the Sayyid’s people. When I asked them why they had done this, I was told, ‘Those were our orders.’ Everyone agreed there were orders.”
“What were those orders exactly?” I asked, getting excited. “That is very important to know. After all, they may have been trying to protect Sayyid Majid.”
“True, and that is precisely what one of the men claimed. All the accused agreed that they had orders to bring Sayyid Majid to the office of the Sayyid. But one of them suddenly blurted out, ‘We were trying to defend him from the crowd.’ ”
“You see!” I said. “I knew it! Surely that casts an entirely different light on the meaning of events?”
“Not really, not after you start to carefully piece through the sequence of events,” replied the judge. “I challenged this witness at the time, asking him, if defending Sayyid Majid was the purpose, why then did they tie his hands? And why tie them to his rear, not to the front, where he could at least have used his arms to block the blows that were hailing down on him from every direction? And why run the rope round and round his torso with men pulling front and back, rendering him totally immobile? And why let people go on beating him and jabbing at his body with knives during the entire length of the walk to the Sayyid’s office? Why do all or any of those things if you wanted to protect Sayyid Majid?”
“What did the man say?” I asked, crestfallen.
“He fell silent and stared sullenly at the floor.”
“I was just hoping…,” I said softly. “Damn it! I don’t know what I was hoping.” I was muttering to myself and then fell silent as my own lingering illusions began to dissipate. The judge came to the rescue by getting up to serve us both glasses of water from the jug that was on his desk.
“By the way,” he then said, looking at the glass as he poured, “all of the men we arrested were afraid. I mean really afraid. They knew they had landed in a hornet’s nest but did not know if anyone was going to come to their rescue. I will never forget one man who wore a turban; he must have been a Sheikh. He said something in the antiquated language these clerics use, which I didn’t understand at the time. He said the Sayyid had asked them to bring Sayyid Majid to him in order to ‘say his word on him.’ I did not understand that expression, which I gather is common in medieval texts. I found out later it meant the Sayyid wanted him brought to him to pronounce judgment on his fate.”
“What was the condition of Sayyid Majid by the time they reached the door of the Sayyid’s office?”
“He was upright and conscious, barely so, but strong enough to speak, and, in that same formal Arabic that these Sayyids use, he asked for protection from the House of Sadr. You understand this is a very powerful thing to ask for. An Arab of true nobility and character cannot refuse the protection and hospitality of his home when asked, not even by a murderer. Two men were already dead. Sayyid Majid and two more of his group, also bound, had made it alive to the door of the Sayyid. Now came the moment of reckoning. What was the Sayyid going to say?”
“A truly remarkable moment,” I said in amazement.
“A historic one, if you think about it,” replied the judge. “I mean, here are two sons of Grand Ayatollahs, the most venerated men of their age, leaders of two of the greatest Houses of the Shiʻa, the one son having come with the Americans supposedly to liberate Iraq, the other having stayed and lived all his life under Saddam; both have lost brothers or fathers to the great Tyrant; they meet on the day of the fall of Baghdad, at the door of a house bordering the Great Shrine, the holiest site of the Shiʻa world, and the one asks for the protection of the other.”
Before the Hanging
The judge and I fell silent after that. I was over my moment of weakness. Nudging away at the back of my mind was the feeling that something important had just happened. The time for prevarication and searching was past. I was at the end of a journey.
Meanwhile, it was getting late. I couldn’t expect the judge to stay much longer with me. He had duties to perform. I had to squeeze out of the moment every little detail I could. “What happened next, Your Honor?” I asked.
He woke up as if from a reverie, and snapped back quickly into his former rhythm: “It is at this point that two versions of why all of this was happening appear: One version has it that all along the Sayyid wanted to protect Sayyid Majid. But that did not make sense. The door would have been opened if that were the case, and Sayyid Majid would have been taken into the house, his wounds tended to. That did not happen. Two other witnesses within earshot
provide an entirely different version. They actually heard the Sayyid say from inside the house, ‘Take him out of here and dispose of him.’ At which point an unidentified person opened the door of the Sayyid’s office and passed on the message. You have to understand there was no more than a meter or two between the people standing inside the office and the crowd milling about on the other side of the door. Upon hearing this, Sayyid Majid was struck a fatal blow with a long knife plunged deep from the rear and through his left side; this is the blow that actually killed him. He fell, dying but not yet quite dead. Seconds later another man appeared at the door—there must have been quite a crowd inside the office whispering and talking to one another all at the same time. This new man, less than a minute after his predecessor, said, ‘The Sayyid says, keep him close, until he chooses to say his word on him.’ But it was too late. Sayyid Majid had already been delivered the fatal blow, and his body was convulsing and twitching on the ground at the time this other man opened the door.”