| FartinMowler |
And I thought only American kids are dumb
Quote:
DUBAI (AFP) - Seven children are reported to have died worldwide after seeing video footage of the execution of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, many in "play" hangings that ended in tragedy.
Television pictures of Saddam's hanging in Baghdad on December 30 were broadcast globally, and a more graphic and grisly bootleg video of his execution, shot using a mobile phone, spread like wildfire on the Internet.
The latest victim was a boy of 12, who hanged himself in northeast Saudi Arabia on Sunday, the daily Al-Hayat reported on Monday.
He stood on a chair and wrapped wire round his neck before attaching it to the door of the family home at Hafr al-Batin, the paper said, adding he had seen Saddam's execution on television.
After the Baghdad hanging in which Saddam was executed for the killings of 148 Shiite villagers in the 1980s, Al-Iraqiya public television was the first to broadcast footage of the fallen tyrant's final moments.
By December 31 a pirate video of the hanging was already available on the Internet, extracts from which were also transmitted by TV channels.
In Yemen bordering Saudi Arabia, police said two 13-year-old boys met the same fate as the former Iraqi president.
Saddam Hussein -- a widely used patronymic -- al-Jaki wrapped a cord around his neck last Wednesday and hanged himself from a tree at his home in the capital Sanaa.
Three days later, Mohammed al-Razami was playing with a group of friends in Syani village, 200 kilometres (124 miles) south of Sanaa, when he attached a rope hanging from a tree around his neck.
The youth struggled to save himself but could not.
In Pakistan, police said a young boy who tried to copy scenes from the execution video died in a similar manner.
Mubashar Ali, nine, hanged himself while re-enacting Saddam's hanging with the help of his elder sister, 10. He tied a rope to a ceiling fan and then to his neck at his home in Rahim Yar Khan district on December 31.
His father said the children had been watching the video on television and tried to imitate the hanging when other family members thought they were just playing in another room.
A 15-year-old girl from eastern India also hanged herself from a ceiling fan after watching the execution, her father said.
"She said they had hanged a patriot. We didn't take her seriously when she told us that she wanted to feel the pain Saddam did during the execution," the girl's father told AFP from the town of Kharda.
He said his daughter, called Moon Moon, had become extremely depressed after watching TV pictures of Saddam's death.
"She kept watching the scene over and again and didn't take food on Saturday and Sunday to protest the hanging," he said.
Moon Moon died on January 4.
In the United States, a 10-year-old accidentally killed himself after imitating the video clip he had seen on television, the Houston Chronicle reported last week.
The boy tied a slipknot around his neck while on a bunk bed on New Year's Eve, it said. His mother told police her son had watched a report on Saddam's death on the Spanish-language Telemundo news broadcast before the accident.
In Algeria, a group of schoolchildren hanged a 12-year-old male classmate in a "game" imitating the execution two days after the execution.
The incident took place in the village of Oued Rihou in the west of the North African country, l'Authentique newspaper reported.
Also in Algeria, on January 3 a 35-year-old woman in the western coast town of Oran committed suicide by hurling herself from a window in her parents' third-floor apartment because she was "traumatised by images of the hanging", a family member said.
She had been "depressed and hadn't eaten" since watching repeated TV footage of Saddam's gruesome execution, the relative said.
In the week after Saddam's hanging, Algerian newspapers reported that several parents had named their children after the executed Iraqi leader.
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