Anger Over Mobile Phone Footage Saddam Execution

Anger swept Sunni Muslim strongholds in the Middle East over mobile phone footage that shows Saddam Hussein being taunted by officials moments before he is seen dangling, neck broken and eyes open, from the gallows.
The images show moments edited out of official images, adding to anger among Sunnis who claim the former leader faced not justice but a vendetta by the Shiite-dominated Government.

Saddam was buried in the dead of night in a domed, marble-floored hall in the village of Awja, after it was handed over to Sunni tribal leaders from his nearby home town of Tikrit on Saturday. His extended family plans to found a presidential library and religious school at the site.

Iraqi government officials, facing a surge of violence because of the way the execution was handled, insist it was not an act of revenge. "This whole execution is about justice," said Hiwa Osman, an adviser to the Iraqi President.

The hanging showed the 69-year-old Saddam in a favourable light, dressed in a tailored white shirt and black coat and surrounded by burly executioners wearing masks. But there was criticism of the process that allowed observers to shoot scenes of the killing on their mobile phones and hurl insults at the former Iraqi leader.

Syria's Information Minister, Mohsen Bilal, said: "The terrifying images of the execution of Saddam Hussein are a violation of the most basic principles."

Exiled members of Saddam's Baath party appeared on Arab satellite television to denounce the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, as a puppet and ally of the militant Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr.

Mr Maliki added insult to injury by attending a family wedding the same day. After witnessing the dawn hanging, a few hours later Mr Maliki presided as father of the groom at a ceremony in Baghdad.

The coincidence heightened anger that Saddam had been killed during preparations for Eid, a time when pleas for clemency are heard by even the grimmest Muslim dictators. Mr Maliki is accused of ramming through the year-end execution order in an attempt to improve his grip on power. He moved after an appeals court upheld a November sentence on Saddam over the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims from the town of Dujail in 1982.

PressRoom5 didn't and will not link to mobile video of execution, because it is wrong to show a person being killed by execution. That right to view is only given to victims not the general public, we are way past the Roman Gladiator Days of public deaths, no matter how evil a person may have been. We will link to what was released by the Iraq government and World News Organizations.