"We are an Oriental people and it is the will of the...

"We are an Oriental people and it is the will of the people," said an Iraqi judge who whipped up a storm this week by condemning three men to death even before a ban on capital punishment had been officially lifted. Judge Taleb Sabeh al-Shaibani made the comments to AFP at a Baghdad court house.
"The majority of people approve of my decision and demonstrations took place in the streets afterwards to celebrate," he said. On July 10, Shaibani handed three men the death penalty for rape and murder. The sentences were the first to be issued by an Iraqi court since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, after which the US-led occupation administration suspended the death penalty. Interim President Ghazi Yawar had said the ban would be lifted in the near future, while Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had noted that capital punishment would be re-introduced for a limited timespan. But nothing official had happened yet, so Shaibani in his judgement implimented article 406 of the former penal code, which still provided for capital punishment.
"For us the simple act of seeing our daughter sitting next to a stranger drives us crazy so just imagine how we would feel about a father who rapes his daughter for two years and then decapitates her, it is horrible," he said.
"The parents of the condemned man cheered when I read out the sentence."
The accused, a 45-year-old man, was found guilty of having a sexual relationship with his daughter and beheading her after discovering that she had fallen pregnant.
In a second case on the same day, the Karbala tribunal condemned to death a 25-year-old man who confessed to killing his father, mother-in-law and four brothers with a shovel and pickaxe after a dispute over money.
He said some of the victims were finished off by strangling, and that a nephew was found guilty of complicity in the case -- he also received the death penalty.