Hundreds of Sunni Arabs paid their respects Tuesday to former henchmen of Saddam Hussein convicted of crimes against humanity and buried near the former Iraqi dictator's own grave after a gruesome hanging.
The controversy stirred up by Saddam's botched execution was fuelled further when the hanging of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Ahmed Bandar went awry, with Barzan's head ripped from his body as he plunged from the Baghdad gallows. But mourners were much more peaceful than when Saddam was laid to rest on December 31, with little of the popular outpouring expressed for a man seen as a brutal dictator in other parts of the world.
Sheikh Ali al-Nada of the Bayjat clan, to which Saddam and his half-brother Barzan belonged, received condolences in a tent along with cousins of the deceased in Awja, on the outskirts of Tikrit, 180 kilometers (110 miles) north of Baghdad. But there was no commemorative shooting in the air and offices and shops remained open amid a mood of sorrowful tranquility in the Iraqi city.
Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi told British television Monday that he had been caught off-guard by the executions, which the multi-confessional Presidency Council had asked be delayed. "We have not been consulted and I was caught by surprise because the Presidency Council had made an appeal to postpone this execution," Hashemi told Channel 4 News during a visit to Britain.
Barzan, the former head of the feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency, and Bandar, chief of the disbanded Revolutionary Court, were convicted in November along with Saddam of the murders of 148 Shiite villagers after an assassination attempt against Saddam in 1982.
Barzan and Bandar were buried late Monday in the grounds that surround Saddam's own grave, set among flowers and Iraqi flags in the floor of a light pink marble hall built during his regime for public condolences.
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