BAGHDAD, Dec 31: Thousands of Iraqis flocked to Saddam Hussein's hometown of Ouja on Sunday, where the deposed leader was buried in a religious compound 24 hours after his execution.
Dozens of relatives and other mourners, some of them crying and moaning, attended the interment shortly before dawn near Tikrit, 130 kilometres north of Baghdad. A few knelt before his flag-draped grave. A large framed photograph of Saddam was propped up on a chair nearby.
“I condemn the way he was executed and I consider it a crime,” said 45-year-old Salam Hassan al-Nasseri, one of Saddam's clansmen who attended the interment.
Mohammed Natiq, a 24-year-old college student, said “the path of Arab nationalism must inevitably be paved with blood.”
“God has decided that Saddam Hussein should have such an end, but his march and the course which he followed will not end,” Natiq said.
Police on Saturday blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air and calling for vengeance.
Saddam was captured in an underground hide-out near Ouja on Dec 13, 2003, eight months after he fled Baghdad ahead of advancing American troops.
His burial place is about 3 kilometres from the graves of his sons, Odai and Qusai, in the main town cemetery. The sons and a grandson were killed in a gunbattle with the American forces in Mosul in July 2003.
SADDAM’S BODY: The head of Saddam's Albu-Nassir's clan said the body showed no signs of mistreatment after death.
“We received the body of Saddam Hussein without any complications. There was cooperation by the prime minister and his office's director,” the clan chief, Sheik al-Nidaa, told state-run Al-Iraqiya television. “We opened the coffin of Saddam. He was cleaned and wrapped according to Islamic teachings. We didn't see any unnatural signs on his body.”
On Saturday, Iraqis watched television images of a noose being slipped over Saddam's neck and his white-shrouded body, the pre-dawn work of black-hooded hangmen. They went to bed as new video emerged showing Saddam exchanging taunts with onlookers before the gallows floor dropped away and the former dictator swung from the rope.
In Baghdad's Shia neighbourhood of Sadr City on Saturday, victims of his three decades of autocratic rule took to the streets to celebrate, dancing, beating drums and hanging Saddam in effigy.
There was no sign of a feared Sunni uprising in retaliation for the execution, and the bloodshed from civil warfare on Saturday was not far off the daily average 92 from bombings and death squads.
Outside the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, west of the capital, loyalists marched with Saddam’s pictures and waved Iraqi flags. Defying curfews, hundreds took to the streets vowing revenge in Samarra, north of Baghdad.
Still, authorities imposed curfews sparingly in contrast to the several-day lockdown put in place after Saddam was sentenced to death on Nov 5.
PALESTINIANS: Hundreds of Palestinians flocked to the streets of the West Bank on Sunday to mourn the death of Saddam Hussein, setting up condolence tents and bemoaning the fate of their steadfast ally.
In Jenin in the northern West Bank, about 700 people held a mock funeral and chanted “death to Bush,” “death to al-Maliki” and “death to al-Sadr,” referring to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq and Muqtada al-Sadr, the powerful, radical Shiite Iraqi cleric.
“He was a great man. He was the protector of the Palestinian people,” said Mahmoud al-Adal, of the Palestinian wing of Saddam's Baath party.
Similar pro-Saddam rallies took place in Bethlehem and elsewhere in the West Bank.—AP