In July 1979, opening a specially convened Ba'ath Party meeting, Taha Yasin Ramadan announced that there was a plot against Saddam Hussein who read out a list of more than sixty names of alleged conspirators. They were led away and during that same day they were tried with fifty-five of them being found guilty. Of the fifty-five, twenty-two were executed.

Capture, trial and execution

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Taha Yasin Ramadan was placed on the U.S. list of most-wanted Iraqis, and later depicted as the Ten of Diamonds in the most-wanted Iraqi playing cards. He was captured on August 19, 2003 in Mosul, by fighters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and handed over to US forces.

He was a defendant in the Iraq Special Tribunal's Al-Dujail trial. On November 5, 2006 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. On November 8, 2005, while he was on trial, one of his defense lawyers, Adel al-Zubeidi, was assassinated by three gunmen.

However, on December 26, 2006 the appeals court sent the case file back to the Tribunal, saying the sentence was too lenient and demanding a death sentence. On February 12, 2007 he was sentenced to death by hanging. His sentence was carried out exactly on the fourth anniversary of Iraq's US invasion, before dawn on March 20, 2007 at 3:05 AM Iraqi time, 12:05 UTC. His son Ahmad Ramadan stated his father would be buried in Tikrit, near Saddam's burial place, adding: "It was not an execution. It was a political assassination.

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