Saddam execution supervisor arrested

An adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki today said the person who made the leaked video of Saddam Hussein’s hanging had been detained.

The adviser, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, did not identify the person.

“In the past few hours, the government has arrested the person who made the video of Saddam’s execution,” the adviser said.

“He was an official who supervised the execution and now he is under investigation.”

An Iraqi prosecutor who was present for Saddam Hussein’s execution denied on Wednesday a report that he had accused the country’s national security adviser of possible responsibility for the leaked video of the former dictator being hanged.

“I am not accusing Mowaffak al-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,” al-Faroon said in a telephone interview.

The prosecutor said the two officials were openly taking video pictures, which are believed to be those which appeared on Al-Jazeera satellite television and a website within hours of Saddam’s death by hanging shortly before dawn on Saturday.

The New York Times today reported that al-Faroon 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”.

The Times said it had been unable to reach al-Rubaie for comment. AP also could not reach him Wednesday. His secretary said the security adviser, a close aide to al-Maliki, was in Najaf and would not return until later.

Al-Faroon said there were 14 Iraqi officials, including himself and another prosecutor, as well as three hangmen present for the execution.

All the officials, he said, were flown by US helicopter to the former military intelligence facility where Saddam was put to death in an execution chamber used by his own security men for years.

The prosecutor said he believed all mobile phones had been confiscated before the flight and that some of the officials’ bodyguards, who arrived by car, had smuggled the camera phones to the two officials he had seen taking the video pictures.

Al-Malaki yesterday ordered his Interior Ministry to investigate who the video - who took it and how it reached television and websites for public viewing.

The photos showed an ugly scene in Saddam’s last moments of life, with taunts and cries of: “Go to hell!” called out before he dropped through the gallows floor and swung dead at the end of a rope.

Al-Faroon quoted Saddam as responding: “We go to heaven and you go to hell”.

The official video of the hanging, which never showed Saddam’s actual death, was muted and gave the impression of a dignified execution.

That tape was broadcast worldwide in the hours immediately after Saddam was hanged, but quickly overshadowed when the unofficial video reach the public.

The unruly scene has prompted a worldwide outcry and big protests among Iraq’s minority Sunnis, who lost their preferential status when Saddam was ousted in the US-led invasion of March 2003.

Some of the last words Saddam heard, according to the leaked cell phone video, were a chant of “Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada,” a reference 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.