Iraqi official says Saddam co-defendants to be executed Thursday

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) _ Preparations are under way to execute two of Saddam Hussein's co-defendants in the next few days, but the details still must be worked out with the U.S. military, Iraqi media and

Wednesday, January 3rd 2007, 8:44 am

By: News On 6

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) _ Preparations are under way to execute two of Saddam Hussein's co-defendants in the next few days, but the details still must be worked out with the U.S. military, Iraqi media and a government official said Wednesday.

Saddam's half brother Barzan Ibrahim, a former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were originally scheduled to die with Saddam. But their execution was delayed until after Islam's Eid al-Adha holiday, which ends Wednesday for Iraq's majority Shiites.

Iraqi government officials, meanwhile, arrested an unidentified government official suspected of recording Saddam's raucous execution with a cell phone camera. What appeared to be unedited video of Saddam's last minutes appeared on Al-Jazeera television and a Web site within hours of his hanging. Shouted taunts and insults in the execution chamber inflamed Iraq's sectarian anger.

``In the past few hours, the government has arrested the person who videotaped Saddam's execution,'' said a top political adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. ``He was an official who supervised the execution and now he is under investigation.''

The U.S. military has tried to distance itself from the hanging, with a spokesman saying it would have handled the execution differently had it been in charge, and adding that Saddam was ``dignified'' and ``courteous'' to his American jailers before being handed over to the Iraqis.

In Washington, a lawyer for al-Bandar asked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday to block the U.S. military from transferring custody of the condemned man to Iraqi authorities. U.S. courts have so far declined to intervene.

U.N. human rights chief Louise Arbour appealed to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to prevent the execution of Ibrahim and al-Bandar, saying she was concerned with ``the fairness and impartiality'' of their trials.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, hotly denied that he was involved in taking video of the execution. He spoke to CNN after the announcement of the arrest of the unidentified official in the case.

The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing a prosecutor in the Saddam trial present at the execution, that al-Rubaie had recorded it with a cell phone.

Al-Rubaie said neither he nor any other Iraqi official had shot and leaked the video to Al-Jazeera television and Web sites, where it appeared within hours. Instead, he suggested that Sunni insurgents had somehow infiltrated the execution chamber.

According to the Times, Munqith al-Faroon, the prosecutor, told the newspaper ``one of two men he had seen holding a cell phone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein's last moments up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki's national security adviser.''

But al-Faroon, in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday, denied the report. ``I am not accusing Mowaffak al-Rubaie, and I did not see him taking pictures,'' he said.

``But I saw two of the government officials who were ... present during the execution taking all the video of the execution, using the lights that were there for the official taping of the execution,'' he added in a telephone interview. ``They used mobile phone cameras. I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces.''

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, a spokesman for the U.S. military, said it had nothing to do with Saddam's hanging, adding that such executions were the responsibility of the Iraqi government.

``It's a sovereign nation. It's their system. They make those decisions,'' Caldwell said.

He also said that Saddam was ``dignified'' and ``courteous'' as he was transferred from U.S. military control to Iraqi custody before he was executed.

``He spoke very well to our military police, as he always had, and when getting off at the prison site, he said farewell to his interpreter; he thanked the military police squad,'' Caldwell said.

Caldwell said the United States would have handled Saddam's execution differently had it been in charge.

``If you are asking me: 'Would we have done things differently?' Yes, we would have. But that's not our decision. That's the government of Iraq's decision,'' Caldwell said.

Saddam's unruly execution, which occurred during a Muslim holiday, provoked anger among the former dictator's fellow Sunni Arabs, who have taken to the streets in mainly peaceful demonstrations across the country.

Al-Maliki on Tuesday ordered his Interior Ministry to investigate who shot the video and how it reached television and Web sites.

The video recorded Saddam's tumultuous last moments, as spectators taunted him before he dropped through the gallows floor and swung dead at the end of a rope.

The video that was broadcast on Iraqi television never showed Saddam's actual death. It was muted and gave the impression of a dignified execution.

Al-Arabiya satellite television and Al-Furat TV, run by Iraq's major Shiite Muslim political organization, both reported Wednesday that the co-defendants, Ibrahim and al-Bandar, would go to the gallows on Thursday. But Mariam al-Rays, an al-Maliki adviser, called such reports ``baseless.''

A government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, told the AP that final arrangements still needed to be made with U.S. officials about the time and place of the executions. The American military was expected to transport the two men from prison to the execution site.

Barzan and al-Bandar's executions were delayed so that Saddam could be ``executed on a special day,'' al-Rubaie told state-run Al-Iraqiya television on Saturday.

Saddam, Ibrahim and al-Bandar were sentenced to death for the 1982 killings of 148 Shiite Muslims in the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after a failed assassination plot against Saddam. They were convicted Nov. 5, and the verdict was upheld by an appeals court Dec. 26.

Saddam was hanged in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazamiyah. During his regime, Saddam had numerous dissidents and opponents executed in the facility, located in a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi capital's most important Shiite shrine, the Imam Kazim shrine.

Al-Faroon, the prosecutor, told the AP that there were 14 Iraqi officials, including himself and another prosecutor, as well as three hangmen, at the execution. All the officials, he said, were flown by U.S. helicopter to the site.

The prosecutor said he believed all cell phones had been confiscated before the flight. Some bodyguards, who arrived by car, had smuggled the camera phones to the two officials he had seen taking the video, he said.

Some of the last words Saddam heard, according to the leaked cell phone video, where a chant of ``Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada.'' The taunts refer to Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American Shiite cleric, whose Mahdi Army militia is believed responsible for many of this year's wave of killings that have targeted Sunnis and driven many from their homes.

Al-Sadr's father was killed by Saddam. The militant cleric is a key al-Maliki backer.

Meanwhile, al-Maliki told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Tuesday that he wishes he could leave office before his four-year term expires, and he would not run again.

``I did not want to take this position,'' he said, calling it ``impossible'' that he would serve a second term, he was quoted as saying.

Also Wednesday, U.S. troops detained 23 people suspected of having ties to senior al-Qaida leaders in raids in western Iraq, the military said. The raids took place in Ramadi, the capital of volatile Anbar province.

During the raids, three suspects detonated a bomb, then ran into a house. U.S. troops shot one of the suspects, wounding him as he tried to flee, the military said.