Saddam buried in dead of night
2006-12-31 13:19
Tikrit - Saddam Hussein, once one of the most high-profile leaders in the Middle East, was buried privately on Sunday in the dead of night at his home village in Iraq one day after swinging from the gallows.
The governor of the late dictator's home province and a tribal leader collected his body from Baghdad, where he was executed at dawn on Saturday for crimes against humanity, to take him home for a swift burial.
"Saddam Hussein has been buried today at 04:00 (01:00 GMT) in a place that was constructed during his regime in the centre of Ouja," said Musa Faraj, a member of Saddam's family from the area.
Faraj said the building where Saddam was buried was a hall usually used for condolence meetings in Awjah, 180km north of Baghdad.
The governor of Salaheddin province, Hamed al-Shakti, and Ali al-Nida, chief of Saddam's tribe of Albu Nasir, along with many other clansmen attended the burial before the sun rose on a bitterly cold New Year's Eve, said Faraj.
US helicopter transported body
Shakti and Nida went to the capital on Saturday to claim Saddam's body after he was hanged and his corpse was wrapped in a white shroud.
An official close to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said that Saddam's body was flown early on Sunday to Tikrit by the US military.
"At 01:30 Sunday, a US helicopter transported Saddam's body to Tikrit," he said, confirming that the former Iraqi leader was buried in Ouja.
Faraj said security forces had sealed off the town, a stronghold of Saddam's supporters, since Saturday so that "nobody could participate in the burial".
The 69-year-old late dictator was born in Ouja, a bastion of the Albu Nasir tribe and part of Salaheddin province, in 1937. His sons Uday and Qusay, killed by US troops in Mosul in July 2003, are also buried in the village.
Three years after American commandos captured him cowering at the bottom of a hole, Saddam was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on November 5 for killing 148 men and boys in the Shiite village of Dujail in 1982.
The death sentence was confirmed by a judicial panel on December 26, and was carried out at dawn on Saturday inside a former torture centre used by Saddam's intelligence service in the Shiite district of Kadhimiyah in northern Baghdad.
- AFP