Baghdad

The person believed to have recorded Saddam Hussein’s execution on a cellphone camera was arrested on Wednesday, an adviser to Iraq’s prime minister said. The adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said it was ”an official who supervised the execution” and who is ”now under investigation”.

Two former aides of Saddam Hussein will be executed on Thursday, five days after the former dictator was himself hanged in Baghdad, an official at the Iraqi prime minister’s office said on Wednesday. Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, the former chief judge of revolutionary court, will be put to death at dawn Thursday, the official said.

United States forces had no role in Saddam Hussein’s hanging, but would have handled it differently, a US general said on Wednesday after a video of Iraqi officials taunting him on the gallows sparked outrage among Sunni Arabs. Major General William Caldwell also urged the Iraqi government to reach out to disillusioned Sunni Arabs.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki wants to punish a senior official who filmed Saddam Hussein’s execution then leaked the footage showing him taunted by Shi’ite guards, officials said on Wednesday. ”He’s very serious about this inquiry, and he wants to punish whoever is responsible,” said a Shi’ite lawmaker with close links to the premier.

Saddam Hussein’s executioners exchanged taunts with the former president as they prepared to hang him, invoking the name of a radical anti-United States Shi’ite cleric whose father was killed by Saddam’s agents. Grainy footage of the execution, apparently shot on a cellphone or other low-quality camera by a witness who was standing below looking up at the gallows, was circulating on the internet on Sunday.

Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on Saturday, a dramatic end for a leader who ruled Iraq by fear for three decades before a United States invasion toppled him and was then convicted of crimes against humanity. As day broke on one of the holiest days of the Muslim year, officially-backed television channels flashed the news shortly after 6am.

An Iraqi official denied on Friday suggestions that Saddam Hussein could be hanged as early as Saturday while lawyers for the ousted dictator said he was preparing for his execution. As speculation swirled about the timing of the execution, Iraq’s Justice Ministry denied a comment from a defence lawyer that it had taken custody of Saddam from the United States military.

Ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein said on Wednesday that he would go to the gallows as a ”sacrifice” and called on his former Iraqi subjects to unite against their enemies. Saddam, in a letter written to the Iraqi people from his cell and confirmed as genuine by his defence counsel, said: ”I sacrifice myself.”

An Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling that Saddam Hussein should hang for crimes against humanity, Iraq’s national security adviser told the media. Under the statute governing the Iraqi High Tribunal, the death sentence must be carried out within the next 30 days. The former Iraqi leader was sentenced to death in November.

Iraqi forces were told to cooperate with their Turkish counterparts during a 1980s campaign against Kurdish civilians, according to evidence presented on Thursday to a court trying Saddam Hussein. Prosecutors seeking to prove that the ousted Iraqi dictator ordered the slaughter of 182 000 Kurdish civilians in the 1988 Anfal campaign produced a series of Iraqi military documents.

Prosecutors in Saddam Hussein’s trial for genocide against ethnic Kurds showed graphic footage on Tuesday of dead civilians, including infants, allegedly killed in chemical attacks on their villages. Chief prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon also showed the court a memo that praised a Dutch businessman for supplying Baghdad with banned chemical weapons.

Gunmen who kidnapped 30 people at a Red Crescent office in Baghdad on Sunday have freed 17 hostages, an official of the humanitarian group said on Monday. Maazen Abdulla, secretary general of the Iraqi Red Crescent, said the victims were released unharmed in different parts of Baghdad on Sunday and Monday.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged on Sunday to support Iraq’s government as it battles instability underscored when gunmen carried out a mass kidnapping at a Red Crescent office in the capital. Just before Blair landed in Baghdad for an unannounced visit, police said 10 to 20 people were seized from the Red Crescent’s Baghdad office but the aid agency said more were snatched.

A car bomb exploded on Wednesday in a busy marketplace close to a mosque in a majority Shi’ite area of Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding 25, a security official said. The explosion occurred at about 9am local time in the Kamaliyah neighbourhood at the eastern edge of the city, the official said.

Suspected insurgents set off two bombs in a main square of central Baghdad where scores of Iraqis were waiting for jobs as day labourers on Tuesday, killing at least 70 people and wounding more than 235, police said. The carefully coordinated attack in Tayaran Square at 7am local time involved a parked car bomb and a suicide attacker.

Gunmen killed nine members of two Shi’ite families in a mostly Sunni neighbourhood of Baghdad on Sunday and police found the bodies of 60 more apparent victims of sectarian killings gripping the capital. A father and three sons from another family were also killed in the attack in Jihad district, officials and relatives said.

Gunmen and bombers killed 30 people in Baghdad on Tuesday, including 14 Shi’ite religious workers after a powerful Iraqi Shi’ite leader urged President George Bush to strike harder at Sunni rebels to avert civil war. Gunmen killed the 14 employees of a Shi’ite religious foundation in the capital, while officials said three car bombs killed 16 people and wounded 25.

Police found about 50 bodies with gunshot wounds in Baghdad over the past day, an Interior Ministry source said on Monday, a day after United Nations chief Kofi Annan declared Iraq’s plight as worse than civil war. Sectarian death squads have made the Iraqi capital a killing field and many of the bodies had been bound and tortured.

The chief judge in Saddam Hussein’s trial on Wednesday ordered a defence lawyer to be jailed for a day for ”insulting the court”. Saddam and six co-defendants are on trial for the so-called Anfal or ”Spoils of War” military campaign against ethnic Kurds in 1988 which prosecutors say killed up to 180 000 people.

Gunmen attacked a Sunni Arab neighbourhood of Baghdad and burned mosques on Friday in apparent retaliation for the bloodiest bombing in more than three years of war that killed 202 in a Shi’ite area. Two suicide bombs ripped through a Shi’ite market in northern Iraq killing 22 people earlier on Friday and mortars crashed on rival Baghdad neighbourhoods.