BAGHDAD: Saddam Hussein’s notorious henchman “Chemical Ali” was executed today, an Iraqi government spokesman said, a sentence carried out around a week after he received a fourth death sentence. “The condemned Ali Hassan al-Majid has been executed by hanging until death today,” said spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh in a statement. On January 17, Majid was sentenced to death for ordering the gassing of Kurds in the northeastern town of Halabja, one of the worst atrocities of late dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime that killed an estimated 5,000 people. Three-quarters of the victims at Halabja were women and children. The conviction for the gas attack that came as the Iran-Iraq war drew to a close in 1988 was the fourth time that Majid, better known by his macabre nickname, has received a death sentence. Handing down the ruling, Judge Abud Mustapha al-Hamani branded Majid’s offences as “deliberate murder, a crime against humanity” when the verdict was delivered amid muffled applause in the courtroom. “Al hamdulillah, Al hamdulillah (praise be to God),” said a stone-faced Majid, in a hearing broadcast on television. A close cousin of Saddam, Majid earned his moniker for ordering poisonous gas attacks in a brutal scorched-earth campaign of bombings and mass deportations that killed an estimated 182,000 Kurds in the 1980s. He had already been sentenced to hang for genocide over the Kurdish offensives when in December 2008 he received a second death sentence for crimes committed during 1991 Shiite uprising.