General Ali Hassan al-Majid

Cousin and henchman of Saddam Hussein known as 'Chemical Ali'

Ali Hassan al-Majid, army officer: born Tikrit, Iraq 1939; Iraqi Interior Minister 1989-91, Defence Minister 1991-95; married; died Basra, Iraq 5 April 2003.

In January, Saddam Hussein's first cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid visited Damascus to shake hands with the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, before going to Beirut, where he used foul language and cursed "other Arabs" who were not coming to Iraq's aid and who permitted American and British troops on their soil. Egyptian officials leaked to the press that they had been expecting a delegation from Baghdad, but, when they found out it was headed by Majid, they cancelled it.

Last December the Foreign Office showed a film of Majid kicking and slapping prisoners, and army deserters. "Let's execute one so the others will confess," he says in Arabic, with the heavy accent found only in the Tikriti homeland of Saddam Hussein. Turning to another captive, he says: "Don't execute this one. He will be useful to us." Majid kicks one of them, whose hands are tied behind his back, before pointing his handgun to the man's head and executing him in cold blood.

Majid was one of the most brutal members of Saddam's inner circle and was entrusted by his cousin to defend the southern sector of Iraq and the historic city of Basra during the current fighting in Iraq. He had been dubbed "Chemical Ali" by the Kurds and other opponents for ordering a 1988 poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds.

A chain-smoking, pot-bellied officer, with no educational qualifications, Majid impressed Saddam with his ruthlessness. Majid was known as "the man for dirty missions", according to Hytham Rashid al-Waheeb, a presidential aide to Saddam for 10 years. "Whenever Saddam Hussein finds himself in a crisis, there is usually one man he turns to – General Ali Hassan al-Majid."

In August 1990, after Baghdad's invasion of Kuwait, Saddam appointed Majid military governor of Iraq's "19th province" but replaced him three months later for fear that his brutal reputation was strengthening the hand of Kuwait's allies. Six hundred Kuwaiti civilians disappeared under Majid and are still missing.

In 1987, Saddam made him chief of the Baath Party in northern Iraq with the task of suppressing an uprising among the Kurdish minority. Over the next 12 months, Majid ordered nerve- and mustard-gas attacks on scores of villages, including on the town of Halabja in March 1988. He lead the "Anfal" ("spoils of war") campaign against Kurdish rebels who took advantage of Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran to step up their long campaign for autonomy in their northern heartland. Chemical weapons were used up to 60 times during the two-year campaign he waged against the Kurds.

Majid was responsible for the murder or disappearance of some 100,000 Kurds and the forced removal of many more. Iraqi opposition put the figure at 150,000. Hundreds of Kurdish villages and communities were destroyed.

He was also the architect of the 1970s "torched land" policy which set Kurdish orchards on fire when peshmerga fighters were sheltering in them. He deported thousands of Kurds from the northern mountains to the deserts in the south, causing misery and disease as part of his "Arabisation" policy.

On the eve of the 1991 uprising in Kurdistan – where he was in charge of the northern provinces after brutally putting down the uprising in the south – he took hundreds of Kirkuk and Erbil residents, including Kurds, Assyrians and Turkomans as human shields. They were freed in a deal with the Kurds.

Ali Hassan al-Majid is thought to have been born in 1939 in Tikrit, north-west of Baghdad, where Saddam's tribe of Abu Nasir lived. There was no proper birth register or documentation on those days. Majid was given a messenger job through Brig-Gen Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who filled the army with his tribal relatives. He remained a warrant officer and motorcycle messenger in the army until the Baath party led a coup in 1968 making Bakr president. Majid was promoted quickly to the rank of brigadier-general and served as Interior Minister in 1989-91, and as Defence Minister in 1991-95, as well as a regional party leader.

In the 1960s, Saddam had recruited him, and many other clan members, to a gangster-like secret network without the knowledge of the Baath party leadership. Gangs led by Saddam, Mohammed Saeed el-Sahaf (the current information minister), Izzat al-Duri and Tariq Aziz (the current deputy prime minister) controlled the Baghdad underground crime scene and terrorised their opponents. Saddam kept the organisation secret until he used the apparatus to take over the leadership in a bloody purge in 1979. Majid took part in liquidating no less than 15 party members, whom he shot in cold blood in one afternoon.

He was loyal to Saddam through a Mafia-style bond. In 1995 he joined Uday, Saddam's eldest son and a pathological killer, in leading a group of Tikriti thugs who killed his own uncle and father-in-law Kamel Ali and his cousins Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel and the rest of the family members. The two Kamel brothers – who were also Saddam's sons-in-law – had committed the sin of fleeing Iraq to Jordan with Saddam's two daughters. Hussein Kamel, who had been in charge of the Weapons of Mass Destruction programme, gave UN inspectors valuable information. Saddam claimed to have forgiven them and invited them back to their death.

Saddam forced Uday, who was apparently paralysed by an assassination attempt in 1997, to marry the 16-year-old daughter of Majid. A lavish wedding was designed by Saddam to heal a rift in the ruling family after the murder of the two high-level defectors.

Saddam's inner circle was made up of relatives or clansmen like Majid, upon whose loyalty he could count. And certainly Majid was among the closest. Iraqi exiles in London cheered at the news of his death after an airstrike on Majid's house in Basra.

Adel Darwish