The chief judge threw out one of the top defendants in the Saddam Hussein's trial amid fierce arguments Wednesday as the prosecution and defense accused each other's witnesses of lying.
According to the AP, court guards hustled former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim out of the courtroom after he rebuked chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman for warning a defense witness that he could be prosecuted if he was not telling the truth.
Ibrahim told Abdel-Rahman he should be more "patient," saying, "I believe we should hear the witness and take what is useful and ignore what is not useful." "Every session you have a lecture," Abdel-Rahman responded, ordering Ibrahim to sit down.
When Ibrahim argued back, Abdel-Rahman shouted, "Get him out of the court."
The disturbance came after the defense witness alleged that chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi tried to pay him to make up testimony against Saddam and his seven co-defendants in the trial.
"One day they took me to a room where I met someone and he said: 'What you are saying is not good for us or the Iraqi people. We want to have the tyrant Saddam executed'," said the witness of Moussawi and others.
"An officer threatened me and said if I speak out about this, he will kill me and my family. I watched the court on television at a later time and realized that Moussawi was the same guy."
Al-Moussawi dismissed these claims.
