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BAGHDAD - Two of Saddam Hussein's aides were hanged before dawn today, the Iraqi government said, admitting that the head of his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was also decapitated during the execution.
Awad Hamed al-Bander, the former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, and Barzan were convicted over the killing of 148 Shias after an attempt on Saddam Hussein's life in 1982.
Clearly conscious of international uproar over sectarian taunts during the illicitly filmed hanging of the ousted president two weeks ago, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh insisted at a news conference there was "no violation of procedure".
"The convicts were not subjected to any mistreatment," he said describing the beheading by the rope as a rare mishap. "Their rights were not violated. There was no chanting."
A government adviser, Bassam al-Husseini, told the news conference the damage to the body of Barzan, Saddam's feared head of intelligence, was "an act of God".
Dabbagh said: "In a rare case, the head of Barzan was detached from his body during the execution."
It may nonetheless fuel criticism of the process. Hangmen gauge the length of rope required according the weight of the condemned -- it should be long enough to ensure the neck breaks but no so long that the force decapitates the convict.
The treatment of corpses is a particularly sensitive issue in Muslim culture. Video footage of Saddam's body lying on a trolley showed what appeared to be a wound on his throat.
The execution took place at 3am (1.00pm NZT), Dabbagh said. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government had tried to impose a media blackout for several hours but word leaked out.
A lawyer for Bander, Badia Aref, said the family had been told by US officials to arrange for Bander's body to be collected. Barzan's daughter told Al Arabiya television she had not been informed of her father's death.
Dabbagh said the families would be told in due course.
Local officials said Barzan would be buried close to Saddam in their home village of Awja, near the northern city of Tikrit. Muslim tradition dictates that they be interred within a day.
After Saddam was hanged amid sectarian taunts captured on film, the United Nations urged Iraq to reconsider further death sentences and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, an opponent of capital punishment, said last week he thought there should be a delay in executing the other two condemned men.
Talabani left the country yesterday to visit Syria.
The emergence of illicit mobile phone video showing Saddam being taunted by Shi'ite observers at his execution, four days after his appeal failed, angered many in his Sunni Arab minority, embarrassed the Shi'ite-led government and the US administration and raised sectarian tensions.
Shi'ites celebrated in the streets of Baghdad's Sadr City slum, a bastion of the cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. His name was heard being chanted at Saddam on the gallows. A unnamed guard faces legal proceedings following a government inquiry into the circumstances of Saddam's execution.
Barzan was a feared figure in Iraq at the head of the intelligence service in the 1980s. Bander presided over the Revolutionary Court which sentenced 148 Shi'ite men and youths to death after an assassination attempt on Saddam in the town of Dujail in 1982. With Saddam, they were convicted on Nov. 5.
The governor of Saddam's home province, Salahaddin, told Reuters Barzan would be buried in the cemetery at Awja, where Saddam was born and where he was buried two weeks ago.
Barzan would lie close to Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, who were killed by US troops in 2003, not in the building that has become Saddam's mausoleum, visited by thousands of mourners.
Barzan, 55, ran the Mukhabarat intelligence service from 1979 to 1983. Witnesses in the trial said he personally oversaw torture, eating grapes as he watched on one occasion, and had a meat grinder for human flesh at his interrogation facility.
He was Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva from 1988 to 1997, where he is remembered as an elegantly suited man dubbed "Saddam's banker in the West".
Barzan was captured by US special forces in Baghdad in April 2003. He was the five of clubs in a US deck of playing cards representing the most wanted men in Iraq.
Prosecutors said Bander sentenced some of the men from Dujail after they had already been killed and that among those sentenced were under-18s who could not legally be executed.
- REUTERS
