Barzan: Show goes on

Baghdad, Jan. 3 (AP): Preparations were being made to hang two of Saddam Hussein’s co-defendants within the next few days, Iraqi media and a government official said today.

An Iraqi government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to release the information, said Saddam’s half brother Barzan Ibrahim, a former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, would be executed tomorrow. He said the exact place and time of the hangings had not been set.

The official said final arrangements still needed to be made with US officials, because the American military was expected to transport the two men from prison to the execution site.

Al-Arabiya satellite television and Al-Furat TV, run by Iraq’s major Shia political organisation, both also reported that the two men would be put to death tomorrow. Later, Al-Arabiya said it could not confirm the report.

And Mariam al-Rays, an adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, called such reports “baseless”.

The two co-defendants were originally scheduled to hang last Saturday along with Saddam, but their executions were delayed until after the Id ul-Zuha holiday, which ends today for Iraq’s majority Shiites. The holiday marks the end of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Barzan and al-Bandar’s hangings were delayed so that Saddam could be “executed on a special day,” national security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run al-Iraqiya television on Saturday after the former leader was put to death. Saddam and the two co-defendants were sentenced to death for the 1982 killings of 148 Sunnis in the town of Dujail, near Baghdad, after a failed assassination plot against Saddam.