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January 9, 2007
Children die in "Play" Saddam hanging
The image of a 10-year-old American boy, who watched Saddam's hanging onthe Spanish-language Telemundo news before before the accident.
CAIRO — At least eight children worldwide have lost their lives when they imitated the hanging of ousted Iraqi president after watching the video of the grisly execution.
A 12-year-old Turkish boy, Alisan Akti, became the last victim Monday night, January 8, after hanging himself in an unused room at his family home in the southeastern village of Sutluce.
"After watching the footage, my son kept asking questions such as 'How did they execute Saddam?', 'Did he suffer?'. He lost his life while trying to copy it," the boy's father, Esat Akti, told reporters his son's funeral Tuesday, reported Agence France-Press (AFP).
The bereaved father added: "They should pull the footage off screens."
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 violent scene badly traumatized children in the four corners of the world with deadly imitations making the headlines.
Mass-circulation Saudi Al-Hayat newspaper reported Monday that a 12-year-old boy hanged himself in northeast Saudi Arabia on Sunday after standing on a chair and wrapped wire round his neck before attaching it to the door of the family home.
In Yemen, police said two 13-year-old boys met the same fate as the former Iraqi president.
In Pakistan, Mubashar Ali, nine, hanged himself while re-enacting Saddam's hanging with the help of his elder sister, 10.
In Algeria, a group of schoolchildren hanged a 12-year-old male classmate in a "game" imitating the execution two days after the execution.
In the United States, a 10-year-old boy also took his life after tying a slipknot around his neck while on a bunk bed on New Year's Eve.
A grisly new video showing the body of Saddam Hussein shortly after his hanging, his head sharply twisted to one side and a gaping bloody wound to his neck, was posted on the Internet Tuesday.
Vulnerable
Psychologists violent events like Saddam's hanging badly influence behavior with children being most vulnerable as they tend to imitate what they watch on television.
"When children see frightening, scary and aggressive scenes, such as hangings and school shootings, some will turn away," Nadine Kaslow, chief psychologist at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and a professor at Emory University's School of Medicine, told CBS.
"Others will become obsessed or try and imitate what they are seeing," Kaslow noted.
Kaslow parents need to talk with their children about the violence they see on TV as violence cannot be completely avoided.
"From a young age, it is important … for parents to convey that there is a big difference between what occurs on TV and what should happen in real life," added Kaslow.
The father of a 15-year-old girl from eastern India, the first victim of the grisly scene, who hanged herself on January 4 from a ceiling fan, told AFP that his daughter 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.
"We didn't take her seriously when she told us that she wanted to feel the pain Saddam did during the execution," added the tearful father. (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies)
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1168265497390&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout
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