Execution of Saddam's henchmen stirs more criticism

0 Comments | AFP, January, 2007

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Hundreds of Sunni Arabs were paying their respects to former henchmen of Saddam Hussein convicted of crimes against humanity and buried near the former Iraqi dictator's own grave after a gruesome hanging. The controversy stirred up by Saddam's botched execution was fueled further when the hanging of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Ahmed Bandar went awry, with Barzan's head ripped from his body as he plunged from the Baghdad gallows.

But mourners were much more peaceful Tuesday than when Saddam was laid to rest on December 31, with little of the popular outpouring expressed for a man seen as a brutal dictator in other parts of the world. Sheikh Ali al-Nada of the Bayjat clan, to which Saddam and his half-brother Barzan belonged, received condolences in a...