Iraqi official arrested over Saddam’s hanging video
The person who secretly recorded the execution of Saddam Hussein on a mobile phone has been arrested, an adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said on Wednesday.
“The person who filmed the execution process has been arrested. ... Now he is under interrogation about the goals of his filming,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media.
“He was arrested by Iraqi forces,” he added.
Maliki’s aide didn’t identify the person, but said that he “was an official who supervised Saddam’s execution.”
Iraq state TV aired a brief video of Saturday’s execution, which didn’t show Saddam’s actual death. But the leaked mobile phone footage showed the toppled president being insulted in his final moments, with one witnesses telling him “Go to hell”, before he dropped through the gallows and died.
Earlier on Wednesday, the US military commander in Iraqi, Maj Gen William Caldwell, said the US would have handled the execution differently, and denied reports that US troops searched people entering the room. “This was a government of Iraq decision on how that whole process went down,” he said. But White House spokesman Tony Snow said criticism of the way the execution unfolded was deflecting attention from Saddam Hussein’s real crimes. “There seems to be a lot of concern about the last two minutes of Saddam Hussein’s life and less about the first 69 [years], in which he murdered hundreds of thousands of people,” Mr Snow said.“That’s why he was executed.” The grisly video was aired on an Arabic satellite channel and posted on the Internet, triggering worldwide condemnation and huge protests in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
On Tuesday, the Iraqi government launched an investigation into the video to determine who recorded it and how it reached television and Web sites for public viewing.
Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, was sentenced to death by a U.S.-backed Iraqi court on 5 November over the killings of 148 Shias from the town of Dujail in the 1980s. He was executed before dawn on Saturday in Baghdad and buried near his hometown of Tikrit a day later.
An Iraqi prosecutor, who attended Saddam’s execution, said on Wednesday that he “saw two of the government officials who were present at Saddam’s hanging recording the execution…”
“They used mobile phone cameras,” al-Faroon said. “I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces.”
Some of the officials’ bodyguards, who arrived by car, had smuggled the camera phones to the two officials who filmed the execution, he said.