[31/12] Saddam buried in home town compound

Executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been buried inside a compound for religious ceremonies in the town of his birth.

Saddam was buried shortly before dawn inside the compound in the centre of Ouja, a small town outside Tikrit, Saddam's power base 80 miles north of Baghdad.

The former Iraqi leader's burial place is about two miles from the graves of his sons Uday and Qusai in the main town cemetery. The sons and a grandson were killed in a gun battle with the American forces in Mosul in July 2003.

Few were present for the burial, according the Salahuddin Province governor.

Saddam was captured in an underground hide-out near Ouja on December 13 2003, eight months after he fled Baghdad ahead of advancing American troops.

Iraqi government officials initially wanted to bury Saddam in secret in an unmarked grave to prevent the burial site from becoming a place of pilgrimage.

But the Tikrit burial was arranged after negotiations in Baghdad between the government and US officials and a delegation that included the governor of Salahuddin province and the head of Saddam Hussein's Albu-Nassir clan, Al-Arabiya satellite television reported.

Salahuddin provincial governor Hamad Hamoud Shagtti and Sheikh Ali al-Nidawi, leader of Saddam's clan in Ouja, organised the return of Saddam's body.

In Baghdad's Shiite neighbourhood of Sadr City, victims of his three decades of autocratic rule took to the streets on to celebrate, dancing, beating drums and hanging Saddam in effigy. Celebratory gunfire erupted across other Shiite neighbourhoods in Baghdad and other predominantly Shiite regions of the country.

There was no sign of a feared Sunni uprising in retaliation for the execution and the bloodshed from civil warfare was not far off the daily average - 92 from bombings and death squads.

pa.press.net - 31.12.2006 11:12