Two Saddam aides hanged at dawn

BAGHDAD, Jan 15 (Reuters) Saddam Hussein's half-brother and a former judge were hanged at dawn today, 16 days after the ousted Iraqi president was executed, a senior official said as the government tried to maintain a media blackout.

''It's true. The government will confirm it,'' the source told Reuters, adding that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government was trying to control the flow of information after illicit video of Saddam's death prompted international uproar.

The government spokesman is expected to announce at a news conference scheduled for 10:30 am (1300 hrs IST) that Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former head of intelligence, and Awad al-Bander, former judge on his Revolutionary Court, were hanged for crimes against humanity.

A lawyer for Bander, Badia Aref, said the family had been told by US officials to arrange for Bander's body to be collected. Barzan's daughter told Al Arabiya television that she had not been informed of her father's death.

After Saddam was hanged amid sectarian taunts captured on film, the United Nations urged Iraq to reconsider further death sentences and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a personal opponent of capital punishment, said last week he thought there should be a delay in executing the other two condemned men.

Talabani left the country yesterday to visit Syria.

Highlighting official attempts to control the announcement, a senior state prosecutor, Munkith al-Faroon, was quoted by one news organisation as announcing the executions. But he then immediately denied saying so when contacted by other reporters.

The chief prosecutor in the case, Jaafar al-Moussawi, told Reuters he was unaware of an execution.

Controversy over Saddam's hanging has made Iraqi officials reluctant to speak on the record about some elements of it and some have previously made contradictory remarks in public.

The emergence of illicit mobile phone video showing Saddam being taunted by Shi'ite observers at his execution, four days after his appeal failed, angered many in his Sunni Arab minority, embarrassed the Shi'ite-led government and the US administration and raised sectarian tensions.

Barzan was a feared figure in Iraq at the head of the intelligence service in the 1980s. Bander presided the Revolutionary Court which sentenced 148 Shi'ite men and youths to death after an assassination attempt on Saddam in the town of Dujail in 1982. With Saddam, they were convicted on November 5 of crimes against humanity by the US-sponsored High Tribunal.

The governor of Saddam's home province, Salahaddin, told Reuters Barzan would be buried in the cemetery at Awja, near Tikrit, where Saddam was born and buried two weeks ago.

Barzan would lie close to Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, who were killed by US troops in 2003, not in the building that has become Saddam's mausoleum.

REUTERS SY DS1315