By Mary Fanning and Alan Jones | August 10, 2018
Nadhmi Auchi, the Iraqi-born billionaire, is a defendant in a $4 billion lawsuit filed in Iraq on behalf of survivors of the Saddam Hussein regime’s 1988 chemical weapons attack in Halabja, Iraqi Kurdistan.
The complaint alleges that Auchi is a co-conspirator in the March 16, 1988 chemical attack, also known as the Halabja Massacre or Bloody Friday, that killed over 5,000 civilians and injured more than 10,000 Kurds.
The Halabja Massacre “was and remains the largest poison gas/chemical weapon attack launched against civilians since World War II“ according to the complaint.
The Halabja Massacre was part of a “highly organized, genocidal campaign called Anfal…during which the Saddam Regime murdered as many as 180,000 Kurdish civilians, destroyed approximately 4,000 Kurdish villages, and depopulated areas of the Kurdish Region of Iraq” says the complaint.
According to Dr. John A. Shaw, the former head of the U.S. Department of Defense Office of International Technology Security, “Auchi had been Saddam Hussein’s senior arms dealer and had morphed into his principal international financial bagman,” the complaint alleges. Continue reading