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 Technology News | January 2007 
Official Held in Saddam Hanging Video Probe
 Joshua Partlow - Washington Post
Baghdad - A security guard who used a cell phone camera to videotape the chaotic scene of Saddam Hussein's execution was arrested Wednesday, according to an adviser of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The prime minister's political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, did not identify the guard or say where he was being held. Iraqi authorities are questioning the man to see whether he acted independently or was working with others to intentionally undermine the government's desire to publicly reveal just a brief portion of the execution proceedings, said Rikabi.
In the video portraying the disruptive spectacle, which was broadcast on the Internet around the world, one person taunted Hussein by yelling: "Go to hell." Another voice is heard chanting: "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada," in reference to Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who had family members assassinated by Hussein's regime.
The public release of the footage was "not something proper or acceptable," Rikabi said. "This execution was not an open event, to have been seen by the people all over the world, this is an implementation of justice. And we needed just a small piece [of footage] about the execution, just to show the people this is Saddam," he said.
Rikabi said the guard has not been formally charged. The Iraqi government set up a committee from the Interior Ministry to question witnesses to the execution about the recording of the event.
The deputy prosecutor in Hussein's trial, Munqith al-Faroun, who witnessed the execution, said he watched two official observers using their cellphones to record the execution, but no guards.
"Maybe one of the guards did it secretly, but there were two officials who were doing it openly," Faroun said.
The chaotic execution scene caused protests in Iraq among Sunni Muslims, and both Iraqi and U.S. officials expressed regrets over the way the hanging transpired.
"If you are asking me: 'Would we have done things differently?' Yes, we would have. But that's not our decision. That's the government of Iraq's decision," said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. He did not elaborate on what any potential differences would have been.
At a briefing for reporters in Baghdad, Caldwell stressed that the United States played a peripheral role in the proceedings: transporting Hussein from U.S. custody to the Iraqi Justice Ministry detention center and later allowing Iraqis escorting Hussein's corpse to fly in U.S. helicopters to the Green Zone and to Tikrit for the burial.
Caldwell said Hussein acted "dignified" in his last moments in U.S. custody and was polite to the U.S. military police escorts. He thanked them and said goodbye.
Hussein was sentenced to death following his conviction on crimes against humanity for orchestrating the killing of 148 men and boys from the Iraqi village of Dujail in 1982. Two other co-defendants, Awad Haman Bander, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, and Barzan Ibrahim, Hussein's half-brother, are to be hanged. Rikabi said he did not know when they would be executed.
"We plan to do it very accurately; we will try to avoid any mistakes," Rikabi said. |
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