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AWJA, Iraq - A new video, shot on a cellphone and posted on the internet, shows Shi'ite officials taunting Saddam Hussein as he stood on the gallows.
"Go to hell!" one yelled at the former president.
Saddam's body, shown swinging on the rope, was flown overnight by US
military helicopter to his home city of Tikrit in northern Iraq and, as agreed with US and Iraqi officials, buried in haste at nearby Awja.
The jerky Web footage, apparently shot on a mobile phone by a guard or one of about 20 official observers at the dawn hanging, showed people in the execution chamber chanting the name of Shi'ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr and Saddam smiling back, saying: "Is this what you call manhood?"
After he falls through the trap, abruptly cut off in his recitation of the Muslim profession of faith, someone in the room cries "The tyrant has fallen!" and the film shows the 69-year-old former strongman swinging on the rope, his eyes open and his neck twisted at a 90-degree angle to his right.
Seemingly accusing his captors of misrule, he replied to the taunt of "Go to hell" by asking: "The hell that is Iraq?"
On Sunday in Awja, where Saddam was born in fatherless poverty in 1937, hundreds of mourners flocked to his freshly dug tomb inside a marble-floored hall built by Saddam. Many others attended a ceremony in the Great Saddam Mosque in Tikrit.
Many poured out their anger against the Americans and the Shi'ite majority now in the ascendancy in Iraq's government.
"The Persians have killed him. I can't believe it. By God, we will take revenge," said one man from Mosul, referring to Iraq's new leaders ties to Persian-speaking, Shi'ite Iran.
In other Sunni towns and districts, including the insurgent bastion of Amriya in Baghdad and Baiji and Dhuluiya near Tikrit, local people held funeral observances, including symbolic coffins, to show their respect for a leader who ensured Sunnis enjoyed state favour during his three decades in power.
State television showed the head of Saddam's tribe, Ali al- Nida of the Albu Nasir, and Tikrit's regional governor signing a letter agreeing to bury the body immediately in Awja.
It showed a clock at 11.43pm local time, the shrouded body being checked and the coffin closed before it was loaded on to the back of a pick-up truck and driven to a waiting helicopter.
Iraqis and much of the world had already been transfixed by film shown on state television of Saddam standing in a noose on a gallows once used by his own secret police. The Web footage was more graphic, showing him drop as he begins the second verse of the profession of faith: "I bear witness that Mohammad ..."
Before that voices are heard chanting "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada" for the cleric whose Mehdi Army militia is widely blamed by Sunnis for death squad killings ravaging society.
- REUTERS
