Tehran sues European firms for aiding Saddam’s chemical attacks against Iranians: Judiciary
Iran has filed lawsuits in international courts against European companies that provided chemical materials to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, who used chemical agents against Iranians in the 1980s imposed war, said the head of the Iranian Judiciary’s High Council for Human Rights.
Ali Baqeri-kani made the remarks on Thursday in a meeting with families of the martyrs of the Sardasht chemical bombing during a visit to northwestern Iranian province of West Azerbaijan, according to Press TV.
He said the Judiciary has filed lawsuits for more than 200 of the victims of Saddam’s chemical attacks, and final verdicts have been issued for 70 of the cases.
Baqeri-kani lamented that the same countries which “brutally” butchered the Iranian people through their “chemical weapons” are now “arrogantly” violating the rights of the Iranian people through their “economic and political” tools, making a reference to their use of sanctions and international institutions against Iran.
“The governments that are exerting the highest amount of pressure and the most extensive sanctions against the Iranian people today are the ones that provided Saddam with chemical weapons, prevented international action against the Ba’athist regime and prevented media coverage of Saddam’s crime.”
Baqeri-kani further said the same Western countries that suffocated civilians in Sardasht neighborhoods now claim to champion human rights in Geneva fortresses.
The official invited Western rulers to hold their next socalled human rights meeting in Sardasht, so that they closely see the effects of their atrocities against the Iranian people.
“In the Sardasht crime, although Saddam played the role of the executioner in the most criminal way, the approach and action of some Western governments were certainly not less than the role of the executioner,” Baqeri-kani said.
Those governments, he noted, consciously and deliberately produced and sold chemical weapons to Saddam, supported him in the international arena and suppressed media coverage of his crime in order to shift public opinion in their favor.
Sardasht, a small city in Iran’s West Azerbaijan Province, was targeted by Saddam’s Iraq on June 28, 1987, when Iraqi bombers attacked four densely populated parts of the town with fatal chemical gasses.
Sardasht was the third city after Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki to become the target of weapons of mass destruction. At least 110 people were killed and 5,000 more were injured during the attack.
Iraq launched over 350 largescale gas attacks along the common border with Iran between 1980 and 1988 on combatants and noncombatants, leaving behind over 107,000 victims.
As many as 2,600 of that total died at the time, and more than 45,000 others were left in permanent need of treatment.
Saddam possessed a huge arsenal of chemical weapons, which were reportedly produced using materials supplied by the US and other Western countries. Iranian officials have on numerous occasions urged the international community to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The Kremlin takes into account a threat of new sanctions against Russia and works out various scenarios to protect interests of citizens and business, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Friday.
According to Bloomberg, the US and UK are weighing additional sanctions against Russia over the alleged use of chemical weapons, with options ranging from sanctions against oligarchs to the extreme step of targeting the nation’s sovereign debt, according to people familiar with the matter.
British officials plan to push for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to continue to pressure Russia to provide answers over what they call the use of banned substances, and will raise potential measures with key European allies, including France and Germany, in the coming weeks, according to one of the people.
“Of course, Russia understands this, takes this into account, and works out various scenarios in order to ensure and protect interests of our country, our citizens and our business in the best way possible,” the Kremlin representative said in response to a question whether
Moscow has a plan of action if such restrictions are introduced, TASS reported.
The spokesman noted that Moscow meticulously registers reports of possible new sanctions, so far they are no more than media reports. “At the same time, of course, we understand that based on the mechanism that is used, for example, in Washington, the second part of sanctions is being announced,” he pointed out.
It comes after Washington on Tuesday introduced a new round of sanctions over the Navalny case against Director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Kiriyenko, Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov and four more individuals, as well as a number of enterprises and institutions.