Janaury 15, 2007

Two of Saddam Hussein's aides were hanged before dawn on Monday, the Iraqi government said, admitting that the head of his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was also ripped from his body during the execution.

On the defensive after international uproar over sectarian taunts during the illicitly filmed hanging of the ousted president two weeks ago, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh insisted there was "no violation of procedure" during the executions of Barzan and former judge Awad Hamed al-Bander.

But defense lawyers and politicians from Saddam's once dominant Sunni Arab minority expressed fury at the fate of Barzan, Saddam's once feared intelligence chief, and there was also skepticism and condemnation of Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated government across the mostly Sunni-ruled Arab world.

"The convicts were not subjected to any mistreatment," Dabbagh said describing the beheading by the rope as a rare mishap. "Their rights were not violated. There was no chanting."

Government adviser Bassam al-Husseini said the damage to the body was "an act of God." During his trial for crimes against humanity over the killings of 148 Shi'ites from Dujail, a witness said Barzan's agents put people in a meat grinder.

The treatment of corpses is a particularly sensitive issue in Muslim culture. Video footage of Saddam's body lying on a trolley showed what appeared to be a wound on his throat.

Hangmen gauge the length of rope needed to snap the neck of the condemned but not to create enough force to sever the head.

Saleem al-Jibouri, a senior Sunni Arab member of parliament, told Reuters Barzan's body may have been weakened by the cancer he was suffering: "But we have doubts and we want to ask experts and doctors if it's possible the head can come off," he said.

Barzan's son-in-law hurled a sectarian insult at the government on pan-Arab Al Jazeera television: "As for ripping off his head, this is the grudge of the Safavids," he said -- a historical term referring to Shi'ite ties to non-Arab
Iran.

"They have only came to Iraq for revenge," Azzam Salih Abdullah said from Yemen. "May God curse this democracy."

The hangings took place at 3 a.m. (00:00 GMT) at the same former secret police base where Saddam was hanged on December 30, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said. Officials tried to impose a media blackout for some hours but word leaked out.

APPEALS

After Saddam was hanged amid sectarian taunts captured on film, the
United Nations urged Iraq to reconsider further death sentences and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, an opponent of capital punishment, said last week he thought there should be a delay in executing the other two condemned men.

Talabani left the country on Sunday to visit Syria.

The emergence of illicit mobile phone video showing Saddam being taunted by Shi'ite observers at his execution, four days after his appeal failed, angered many Sunni Arabs, embarrassed the Shi'ite-led government and the U.S. administration and raised sectarian tensions in a nation on the brink of civil war.

Shi'ites again celebrated in the streets of Baghdad's Sadr City slum, a bastion of the cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. His name was heard being chanted at Saddam on the gallows. A unnamed guard faces legal proceedings following a government inquiry into the circumstances of Saddam's execution.

After Barzan's hanging, Moussa Jabor in Sadr City said: "This is the least he should get. He should have been handed over to the people. Execution is a blessing for him."

Barzan was a feared figure in Iraq at the head of the intelligence service in the 1980s, at a time when the Shi'ite majority was harshly oppressed, some like those from Dujail due to suspected links to Shi'ite Iran, then at war with Iraq.

Bander presided over the Revolutionary Court which sentenced 148 Shi'ite men and youths to death after an assassination attempt on Saddam in the town in 1982. With Saddam, they were convicted on November 5 and their appeals rejected on December 26.

Barzan is to be buried in the village of Awja, near the northern city of Tikrit, where Saddam was born and where he was buried two weeks ago, the provincial governor told Reuters.

Muslim tradition dictates he be interred within a day.

Barzan would lie close to Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, who were killed by U.S. troops in 2003, not in the building that has become Saddam's mausoleum, visited by thousands of mourners.

Barzan, 55, ran the Mukhabarat intelligence service from 1979 to 1983. Witnesses in the trial said he personally oversaw torture, eating grapes as he watched on one occasion.

He was Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva from 1988 to 1997, where he is remembered as an elegantly suited man dubbed "Saddam's banker in the West."

Prosecutors said Bander sentenced some of the men from Dujail after they had already been killed and that among those sentenced were under-18s who could not legally be executed.

(Additional reporting by Claudia Parsons, Aseel Kami and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad and Inal Ersan and Diala Saadeh in Dubai)