In shadow of gallows, Saddam's fate still obscure

BAGHDAD, Nov 8 (Reuters) Iraq's prime minister may talk about hanging Saddam Hussein before the year is out but, three days after the former president was condemned, officials remain coy about just how they might carry out the sentence.

Yet lawyers and officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters on Wednesday of a formally secret ''death row'' in Baghdad where they believed Saddam might meet his end -- a once dreaded base for his own military intelligence agents.

Known as the Maximum Security Office -- at a site labelled by American forces as ''Camp Justice'' -- it has handled the last days of dozens of murderers, rapists and convicted militants, holding them in solitary confinement after their appeals fail and then sending them to a newly constructed gallows on site.

In the northern Shi'ite suburb of Kadhimiya, it has replaced Abu Ghraib prison, in the Sunni heartland west of the capital, where Saddam is accused of sending thousands to the gallows -- and which US troops later made notorious by abusing prisoners.

Though the Justice Ministry declines comment on its methods, Saddam's sentence was that he be ''hanged until death'' and the Saddam-era Iraqi penal code only allows for hanging civilians, a method formalised under British imperial rule after World War I.

In September, the Iraqi government released film of what it said were five of 27 men it executed on one day. They stood hooded and dressed in green overalls, hands behind their backs.

Though Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Wednesday he hoped Saddam would die this year -- admittedly a tight schedule in the view of legal experts -- US officials at the court said this week questions on details of any hanging were ''premature''.

ANGER Accusations of political pressure from Maliki's Shi'ites, oppressed by Saddam, have soured the trial and Shi'ite anger has prompted lurid speculation about a public execution. The penal code prescribes hanging ''inside the prison or any other place''.

But while some Iraqis might relish such a spectacle it seems unlikely their leaders and US sponsors would countenance it.

Many will, however, expect at least visual proof of their former leader's demise, as when US forces published graphic images of his dead sons and showed the bodies to journalists after they were killed fighting American troops in July 2003.

The US administration, which has sponsored the legal process and held it up as proof of Iraq's democratic progress, has kept Saddam in the physical custody of its troops at Camp Cropper, part of the US military headquarters at Baghdad airport, even though he is legally held by the Iraqi court.

Though US. officials say Saddam will be hanged by his countrymen, they may be reluctant to hand him over long before the end to avoid any lapse into mob justice.

US authorities were discomfited this year when a video was aired of Iraqi morgue workers beating and abusing the corpse of Saddam's former prime minister, who had died in US custody.

Iraqi defence lawyers and a prosecutor involved in capital cases since hangings resumed a year ago said they saw no reason why the Maximum Security Office would not take charge of Saddam.

''My client was transferred to Kadhimiya, locked in a small cell alone, waiting to be hanged,'' one defence lawyer said.

''The execution took place by hanging in the presence of a doctor, a cleric, representatives of the Interior and the Justice ministries, along with the executioner.'' ''The doctor checks to make sure he's dead ... The Maximum Security Office issues a death certificate signed by the doctor, reading 'Cause of Death: executed by hanging until death'.'' Other lawyers involved in such cases gave similar accounts.

Families are notified of the execution day up to a week in advance and may have a final visit up to a day before. If they wish, the families may retrieve the body for burial.

For Saddam, between now and the noose lies an appeals court that can begin its deliberations within a month. If it upholds the sentence, the Justice Ministry should in theory carry it out within 30 days. But major rows may intervene over the power of Iraq's president and vice presidents to stay any execution.

REUTERS AKJ RN2300