(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-09-04 20:15

The three were sentenced to death on June 24 after being found responsible for the slaughter of thousands of ethnic Kurds in the so-called Anfal campaign of 1988.

They will be hanged within 30 days in line with Iraqi law.

An estimated 182,000 Kurds were killed and 4,000 villages wiped out in the brutal campaign of bombings, mass deportation and gas attacks known as Anfal.

"Thousands of people were killed, displaced and disappeared," Iraqi High Tribunal chief judge Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifah said after he had passed sentence in June.

"They were civilians with no weapons and nothing to do with war."

Majid, 66, was the last of the six defendants to learn his fate in the Anfal case -- the second trial of former Saddam cohorts on charges of crimes against humanity since the fall of the feared regime in 2003.

He muttered only "Thanks be to God" before being led from the court.

He and the other two condemned men are currently on trial for their roles in brutally crushing a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, but the charges against them will be dropped once they have been executed.

Saddam's regime said the Anfal campaign was a necessary counter-insurgency operation during Iraq's eight-year war with neighbouring Iran.

It involved the systematic bombardment, gassing and assault of areas in the Kurdish autonomous region, which witnessed mass executions and deportations and the creation of prison camps.

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