'You want to see Saddam hang?'

2006-12-31 21:33

Baghdad - Euphoric cellphone users from Baghdad's Sadr City were gleefully sharing copies on Sunday of a grainy video showing former dictator Saddam Hussein's execution by hanging.

"This is the destiny of the tyrant," said Sayf Mohammed, a young Shi'ite from the district - a hotbed of anti-Saddam sentiment - as he played the footage stored on his cellphone handset.

"We are transferring the video from one phone to another and distributing it to our friends," Mohammed said, as his three of his pals gathered around him with their telephones to grab a copy.

Mohammed said he bought the tape from a local Sadr City mobile shop.

The final few minutes of Saddam's hanging were apparently captured by a member of his execution party on a mobile telephone camera, and were spreading across the internet on Sunday.

The footage shows an angry but composed Saddam standing on a dusty steel platform in a dark hall in a north Baghdad military base, his hands bound and a rough hemp rope around his neck.

Cell video has sound

A few seconds later Saddam is seen falling to his death as the metal trapdoor opens below his feet.

Just a day after his execution the video footage was selling briskly in Baghdad and especially in Sadr City, a slum district of 2.5 million Shi'ites and a stronghold of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

"We got the footage from one mobile phone and are now selling it for 500 dinars (40 cents)," said Nazar Ridha, owner of Al-Mustakbil mobile telephone shop in Sadr City.

"Many people have come to buy the video which shows the events of what happened yesterday."

An AFP reporter saw crowds of people on various streets in Sadr City exchanging the video with each other.

"Do you want the video? I have it all," said a youngster to his friend in one part of the district which has seen an outburst of joy since Saddam's hanging on Saturday.

Many parents were also seen showing the video to their children.

"I heard that they used the same rope to execute him which he used to kill so many people," a man was heard saying.

The crowds were particularly pleased with the bootleg version of the hanging, as the scenes shown on state television had been stripped of sound.

In the version doing the rounds of Sadr City, members of the execution party could be heard taunting Saddam by chanting Sadr's name: "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!"

Sadr City is the bastion of Sadr's illegal Mahdi Army militia, and thousands of Shi'ite youngsters owe allegiance to the cleric.

Saddam was executed by the Iraqi government at dawn on Saturday in a former military intelligence building in the Khadimiyah district of Baghdad where once his own victims were tortured and killed.

He was buried on Sunday in his home village of Awjah in the north.

The 69-year-old strongman had been convicted of crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 Shi'ites from the village of Dujail, a Shi'ite community north of Baghdad, after he survived an assassination attempt there in 1982. Euphoric cellphone users from Baghdad's Sadr City have been gleefully sharing copies of a video showing Saddam Hussein's execution by hanging. 'D'ya wanna see Saddam hang?'

- AFP