Forensics Team Gathers Evidence Against Saddam

BAGHDAD, July 8, 2006 — -- Even as Saddam Hussein's first trial for the killing of 148 Shiite villagers is winding up, evidence is being gathered for an even bigger case starting in August involving potential genocide against Kurds.

Dr. Sonny Trimble, director of the Iraqi Mass Graves Program in Baghdad, and his 17 staff members are preparing evidence for Hussein's second trial, which will deal with the killing of up to 180,000 Kurds back in 1988.

Trimble and his team are documenting the positions of the bodies in seven mass graves, measuring bones, examining clothes and tracking the trajectories of the bullets.

"You can get a lot of information out of dead bodies," Trimble says.

Two of the graves were almost entirely women and children.

Anticipating their fate, some people in the mass graves had hidden their ID cards in their clothing.

The program's work is a combination of archaeology and crime scene investigation.

"It takes all the other evidence that everybody has collected and it slams the door," Trimble says.

The aim is to give back identities to the victims. Saddam wanted not only to kill his enemies, but to have them completely disappear.

By … creating evidence for the trials," says Ariana Fernandez, an anthropologist, "you are giving the families of these … missing people the right to know what happened to their relatives."

Now that some of the bodies have been exhumed, the forensic team will make every effort to return them to their families once the court case is over.