BAGHDAD, 3 January 2007 — A senior Iraqi court official nearly halted Saddam Hussein’s execution when supporters of a militia leader taunted the former president as he stood on the gallows.
Prosecutor Munkith Al-Faroon, who is heard appealing for order on an explicit Internet video clip of Saturday’s hanging that has inflamed sectarian passions, said yesterday he threatened to leave if the jeering did not stop — and that would have halted the execution as a prosecution observer must be present by law.
“I threatened to leave,” Faroon told Reuters. “They knew that if I left, the execution could not go ahead.”
Many in Saddam’s Sunni minority, and moderate Shiites and Kurds, have been angered and embarrassed by the video. In it, observers chant “Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!” for militia leader Moqtada Sadr. Saddam by contrast looks dignified on the gallows and replies: “Is this what you call manhood?”
As the Iraqi government mounted an investigation into how officials smuggled in mobile phone cameras, Faroon also challenged the accounts of the justice minister and an adviser to the prime minister who said the film was shot by a guard. Faroon said one of two people taking video was a senior government official.
“Two officials were holding mobile phone cameras,” said Faroon, who was a deputy prosecutor in the case for which Saddam was hanged and is the chief prosecutor in a second trial that will continue against his aides for genocide against the Kurds.
“One of them I know. He’s a high-ranking government official,” Faroon said, declining to name the man. “The other I also know by sight, though not his name. He is also senior.
“I don’t know how they got their mobiles in because the Americans took all our phones, even mine which has no camera.”
Faroon said he was the only prosecutor from Saddam’s trial for crimes against humanity against the people of the Shiite town of Dujail who was present in Baghdad. The penal code stipulates that one prosecutor must be present at any execution.
The government released brief silent footage showing only the hangman placing the noose over Saddam’s head. The illicit video shows, as well as the taunts, the former president dropping through the trap and swinging, broken-necked, on the rope.
The Americans screened an official delegation before escorting them to the execution site. US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad urged Maliki to delay the dawn execution for two weeks, till after the long Eid Al-Adha holiday, a senior Iraqi government official said. But he relented when Maliki insisted and provided an authorization also from Iraq’s Kurdish president, the official said on Monday.
Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said yesterday the manner of Saddam’s execution was “deplorable.” He branded the leaked mobile phone footage of his hanging “totally unacceptable.”
Prescott said those responsible for capturing and circulating the footage of the deposed Iraqi dictator’s death should be condemned.
Prescott’s comments, which he admitted could stir controversy, were much stronger than the initial British official reaction in which Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said Saddam had been “held to account” while reiterating Britain’s opposition to capital punishment.
Britain was the United States’ staunchest ally in the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 which led to Saddam being toppled from power and still has around 7,100 troops in southern Iraq based around the second city of Basra.
In a statement posted on the Internet yesterday, Saddam’s fugitive deputy Izzat Ibrahim vowed that the ousted president’s execution would only strengthen the anti-US insurgency. “Saddam Hussein’s assassination at the criminal hands of the US administration and its English, Zionist and Persian Safavid allies will only strengthen the determination of the Baath, its people and the Arab nation to wage jihad,” the statement said.
