Saddam Hussein’s daughter Raghad said on Tuesday she and her sisters wanted an international trial for their father caught by U.S. troops this week.
“He should not be tried by the (Iraqi) Governing Council which was put in place by occupiers,” Raghad Saddam Hussein told Dubai-based Al Arabiya television by telephone from Jordan.
“We want an international, fair and legal trial,” she said in a voice chock-full of emotion, adding that his family would appoint a lawyer to defend him.
Raghad and her sister Rana, who fled Iraq shortly after U.S. troops took control of Baghdad in April, now live in Jordan, which has granted them asylum. The whereabouts of her mother and another sister, Hala, are not clear.
Raghad, Saddam’s eldest daughter, said she could not bear to see the images the U.S. administration in Iraq had broadcast of her father, the former Iraqi dictator who appeared grubby and submissive after his capture on Saturday.
Drugged
Raghad said her father must have been drugged before his capture -- her explanation for the humiliating pictures of a man who was seen by many Arabs as a hero for his anti-Western stance.
“A lion remains a lion even in captivity. Do you think they would have been able to capture him if they had not drugged him? I am sure that they could not have done so,” she said.
“I am really proud that this man is my father. We all know the reason why he was displayed in the way he was. Where is the democracy, where is the immunity that presidents enjoy?”
In an interview with Al Arabiya in August, the 36-year-old Raghad accused close aides of her father of betraying him, which caused him to go into hiding for almost eight months.
In 1996 Saddam ordered the killing of the husbands of both Rana and Raghad after accusing them of giving information about Iraq’s weapons to the West.