Saddam must have been drugged before capture, says daughter

Saddam Hussain must have been drugged before he was captured by US forces, the ousted dictator's eldest daughter, Raghad, told Al Arabiya TV yesterday.

"How do you believe they can capture him if they didn't drug him? I don't doubt it, I'm sure that they couldn't (have captured him otherwise)," she said, speaking by telephone from Jordan, where she was granted asylum after the US-led war to oust Saddam.

"Saddam Hussain is still my father. Every honourable person, and every person who knows him or knew him ... knows that the person on the television was a drugged Saddam Hussain," she said.

"The truth is that I am proud that this person is my father," Raghad said of the 66-year-old former Iraqi president who was captured by US troops late Saturday. "We all know the intention of the way he was displayed, where is the democracy, where is the immunity that state leaders are granted? A lion remains a lion even when he is captured," Raghad said.

"His three daughters Raghad, Rana and Hala ask for a just international trial. He should not be tried by the Iraqi Governing Council ... and we have the right to defend our father."

She said Saddam's immediate family would hire a lawyer in his defence. "How can we not hire a lawyer? This is the minimum right we owe him as his daughters."

Meanwhile, a sister of Saddam has demanded that Saddam be tried before the world court and also said he was drugged by US forces before his capture, a newspaper reported yesterday.

"We do not want a trial in Iraq. We demand a fair trial at the International Court of Justice (in The Hague) in the presence of Arab and foreign lawyers," Nawal Ibrahim Al Hasan was quoted as saying by the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Quds Al Arabi.

The paper quoted her as saying that all of Saddam's relatives were under US custody and were being "maltreated and deprived of food."

She said the detainees included her husband, Arshad Yassin, a former officer in the ousted president's special guard.

Hasan slammed the "humiliations" inflicted on Saddam by the Americans, affirming that he would have "resisted to death had he been fully in control of himself" when he was captured by US forces in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit on Saturday night.

"He must have been drugged or injected with nerve agents that crippled him," she was quoted as saying. "Saddam Hussain, hero of Arabs, would never surrender like this. He must have been subjected to drugs or nerve gas to paralyse him, for he is not one to surrender in this humiliating manner."

The humiliations inflicted on Saddam "are an affront to all Arabs and Muslims," said Hasan, adding that Iraqi resistance to the US occupation would continue, and even increase, following her brother's capture. "Is it possible for a president to be humiliated like this and for the Americans to comb through his hair for nits?" Al Hasan said.

"This is not the Saddam Hussain we know."

Al Hasan said Arab leaders should ensure that her brother had a fair trial in an international court and not in Iraq.

"Saddam Hussain was a desert fighter resisting the occupation of his country, and therefore Arabs and Iraqis must...defend him and guarantee that he is treated well and tried fairly," Al Hasan said.

"The Iraqi resistance to occupation will continue and will escalate after his arrest because resistance is the only way and there can be no cooperation with occupation and occupying powers," she added.