Arrests Made After Videotaping of Saddam Hanging
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi authorities reported the arrests yesterday of two guards and an official who supervised Saddam Hussein’s hanging and said the guard force was infiltrated by outsiders who taunted the former leader and shot the video showing his body dangling at the end of a rope.
The unauthorized video, which ignited protests by Saddam’s fellow Sunni Arabs in various Iraqi cities, threatens to turn the ousted dictator into a martyr. Saddam was shown never bowing his head as he faced death and asking the hecklers if they were acting in a manly way.
Saddam, who was convicted for the killings of 148 Shiites, was dignified and courteous to his American jailers up to the moment he was handed over to the Iraqis outside the execution chamber, an American military spokesman said yesterday.
He “was courteous, as he always had been, to his U.S. military police guards,” Major General William Caldwell said. “He spoke very well to our military police, as he always had. And when getting off there at the prison site, he said farewell to his interpreter.”
National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie and two other top officials variously reported one to three men were being questioned in the investigation into who heckled Saddam as he was minutes from death and took cell phone pictures of his execution.
The clandestine footage appeared on Al-Jazeera television and Web sites just hours after Saddam was hanged Saturday. The tumultuous scenes quickly overshadowed an official execution video, which showed none of the uproar among those on the floor of the chamber below the gallows.
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 hang with Saddam. But their execution was delayed until after Eid al-Adha, which ended yesterday for Iraq’s majority Shiites.
Al-Arabiya satellite television and Al-Furat TV both reported that Messrs. Ibrahim and Bandar would go to the gallows today. However, Mariam al-Rays, a Maliki adviser, called such reports “baseless.”
