Saddam's deputy Ramadan executed, says son

Dubai, Mar 20: Saddam Hussein's former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan was executed today in Baghdad, Ramadan's son told Al Jazeera television.

An Iraqi court had sentenced Ramadan to death for crimes against humanity.

Ahmad Ramadan said his father would be buried in the area of the Iraqi city of Tikrit near Saddam's burial place.

''It was not an execution. It was a political assassination,'' he told Al Jazeera by telephone from the Yemeni capital Sanaa.

Ramadan was sentenced in November to life in jail for his role in the killing of 148 Shi'ites in the town of Dujail in the 1980s for which Saddam and two former aides were hanged. But an appeals court recommended he receive the death penalty.

The trial court in November found Ramadan guilty of issuing orders for the systematic detention, torture and killing of men, women and children from Dujail after an attempt on Saddam's life in the town in 1982.

Saddam was executed at the end of December within days of the sentence being passed, and the other two in January.

Born into a peasant family in the late 1930s, Ramadan worked in a bank before joining the Baath party in 1956 and participating in a 1968 coup that returned it to power.

Ramadan was captured in the northern city of Mosul in August 2003 by Iraqi Kurdish fighters and handed over to US forces.

Reuters