Quran
written in Saddam's blood locked in Baghdad
Tuesday December 21, 2010 05:15:24 PM,
IANS
|
London:
A Quran written in the blood of the late Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein over two years has been locked behind three vaulted doors
in Baghdad and not been opened for three years, it was reported
here.
Over a two year period in the late 1990s, a nurse had drawn 27
litres of Saddam Hussein's blood, which was used by the
calligrapher to transcribe the Quran, The Guardian reported.
The vault containing the Quran is in a vast mosque in Baghdad has
remained locked for the past three years.
"What is in here is priceless, worth absolutely millions of
dollars," Sheikh Ahmed al-Samarrai, head of Iraq's Sunni Endowment
fund, was quoted as saying.
He said: "It was wrong to do what he did, to write it in
blood...It is haraam (forbidden)."
After the US-led invasion in 2003, Samarrai hid pages in his house
and moved others among his relatives.
"I knew this would be much sought after and we made the decision
to protect it. But to see this now is not easy. There are three
keys and none of them are held in the one place. I have one, the
police chief in the area has another and there is a third in
another part of Baghdad. There has to be a decision of a committee
to let you in," he stressed.
Saddam Hussein was hanged to death in 2006.
A year before that in 2005, the government had set up a committee
to oversee the removal of symbols linked to Saddam, the media
report said.
Ali al-Moussawi, a spokesman for the prime minister, Nour al-Maliki,
said: "Not everything built during this regime we should remove."
"There were some sculptures however that were solely about
dictatorship and control over Iraq. Some spoke to dictators and
battles and they should be removed. They have ethnic and sectarian
meanings.
On the Quran written in blood, Moussawi said: "We should keep this
as a document for the brutality of Saddam, because he should not
have done this."
"It says a lot about him. It should never be put in a museum
though, because no Iraqi wants to see it. Maybe in the future it
could be sent to a private museum, like memorabilia from the
Hitler and Stalin regimes."
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