BAGHDAD, 4 January 2007 — Preparations are being made to hang two of Saddam Hussein’s co-defendants within the next few days and an adviser to Iraq’s prime minister said the person who recorded Saddam’s execution on a cell phone camera was arrested yesterday.

An Iraqi government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Saddam’s half brother Barzan Ibrahim Al-Tikriti, a former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed Al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, would be executed today. He said the exact place and time of the hangings had not been set.

The official said final arrangements still needed to be made with US officials, because the American military was expected to transport the two men from prison to the execution site.

The two co-defendants were originally scheduled to hang last Saturday along with Saddam, but their executions were delayed until after the Eid Al-Adha holiday, which ended yesterday in Iraq.

Barzan and Bandar’s executions were delayed so that Saddam could be “executed on a special day,” National Security Adviser Mouwafak Al-Rubaie told state-run Al-Iraqiya television on Saturday after the former leader was put to death.

The adviser to the prime minister identified the person who filmed Saddam’s execution on a cell phone camera as “an official who supervised the execution” and is “now under investigation.”

“In the past few hours, the government has arrested the person who made the video,” the adviser said.

Iraqi state television aired an official video of the hanging, which had no audio and did not show Saddam’s actual death. But the cell phone video showed the deposed leader being taunted in his final moments, with witnesses shouting “go to hell” before he dropped through the gallows floor and swung dead at the end of a rope.

Yesterday, an Iraqi prosecutor who was also present at the execution denied a report that he had accused the country’s national security adviser of possible responsibility for the leaked video. “I am not accusing Rubaie (the national security adviser), and I did not see him taking pictures,” Munqith Al-Faroon, an Iraqi prosecutor in the case that sent Saddam to the gallows, told The Associated Press.

“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. They used mobile phone cameras. I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces,” Faroon said in a telephone interview.

A senior US general said US forces left all security measures at Saddam’s execution, including searching witnesses for mobile phones, to Iraqi authorities.

Asked at a news conference in Baghdad about criticism of the hanging, US military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said: “It was not our decision as to what occurred but we would have done it differently.”

“We had absolutely nothing to do with the facility where the execution took place,” Caldwell said, adding that US forces flew Saddam to the prison where the execution took place at dawn and then withdrew from the building.

Caldwell said US forces were not responsible for searching the witnesses for phones.

Caldwell said Saddam thanked his American jailers as they sent him to his death on Saturday. “Saddam... was dignified, as always, he was courteous as he always had been to his US military police guards. He thanked them for the way he had been treated and said goodbye to them,” Caldwell added.