Saddam Hussein has been buried in the dead of night in his home village following revelations that he traded insults with Iraqi Shiites just seconds before his hanging in Baghdad.
His burial prompted an outpouring of grief and anger from fellow Sunni Arabs who flocked to his grave and held symbolic funerals elsewhere.
Sectarian passions that have pushed Iraq toward civil war since US troops overthrew Saddam in 2003 could be further inflamed by a new video posted on the internet showing Shiite officials taunting him as he stood on the gallows on Saturday.
"Go to hell!" one yelled at the former president as the noose went around his neck.
Saddam's body, shown swinging on the rope in the video, was flown overnight by US military helicopter to his home city of Tikrit in northern Iraq and, in agreement with US and Iraqi officials, buried in haste at nearby Awja before dawn.
The jerky web footage, apparently shot on a mobile phone by a guard or one of about 20 official observers at the dawn hanging, showed people in the execution chamber chanting the name of Shiite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr and Saddam smiling back, saying: "Is this what you call manhood?"
Seemingly accusing his captors of misrule, he replied to the taunt of "Go to hell" by asking: "The hell that is Iraq?"
After he falls through the trap, abruptly cut off in his recitation of the Muslim profession of faith, someone in the room cries "The tyrant has fallen!"
The video shows the 69-year-old former strongman swinging on the rope, his eyes open and his neck twisted at a 90-degree angle to his right.
Yesterday in Awja, where Saddam was born in fatherless poverty in 1937, hundreds of mourners flocked to his freshly dug tomb inside a marble-floored hall built by Saddam. Many others attended a ceremony in the Great Saddam Mosque in Tikrit.
Many poured out their anger against the Americans and the Shiite majority now in the ascendancy in Iraq's Government.
"The Persians have killed him. I can't believe it. By God, we will take revenge," said one man from Mosul, referring to Iraq's new leaders ties to Persian-speaking, Shiite Iran.
In other Sunni towns and districts, including the insurgent bastion of Amriya in Baghdad and Baiji and Dhuluiya near Tikrit, local people held funeral observances, including symbolic coffins, to show their respect for a leader who ensured Sunnis enjoyed state favour during his three decades in power.
State television showed the head of Saddam's tribe, Ali al-Nida of the Albu Nasir, and Tikrit's regional governor of the signing a letter agreeing to take the body from the Government and bury it immediately in Awja.
It showed them checking the shrouded body and closing the coffin before it was loaded on to the back of a pick-up truck and driven to a waiting helicopter.
Governor Mohammed al-Qaisi told Reuters the funeral, after the body had been bathed and dressed according to Muslim ritual, was attended by a few officials and relatives. It lasted 25 minutes.
US and Iraqi troops kept a close guard.
Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, killed by US troops six months before their father was captured near Tikrit in December 2003, also lie in Awja, in a family plot in the cemetery. Their father's grave is dug into the floor of an octagonal, domed building he had built in the 1980s for religious festivals.
Men came in groups of several dozen to pay their respects by the mound of fresh clay, with a gravestone at head and foot and a large photograph, propped on a chair, of a younger, smiling Saddam wearing his trademark black fedora hat.
"All we can do now is take it out against the Americans and the Government," another mourner said. More than 70 people were killed in car bomb attacks on Shiites after Saturday's hanging.
The Government had said Saddam's body might lie in a secret grave for fear the site could become a shrine and focal point for Baathist rebels. A relative said the family planned to found a "presidential library" and religious school on the spot.
"This will honour Saddam Hussein," Muayed al-Hazaa said.
Iraqis and much of the world had already been transfixed by film shown on state television of Saddam standing in a noose on a gallows once used by his own secret police. The web footage was more graphic, showing him drop as he begins the second verse of the profession of faith: "I bear witness that Muhammad ... "
Before that, voices are heard chanting "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada" for the cleric whose Mehdi Army militia is widely blamed by Sunnis for death squad killings ravaging society.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has seen his fragile authority among fellow Shiites such as Sadr enhanced after he forced through Saddam's execution just four days after the appeal court upheld his conviction for crimes against humanity for killing Shiites.
Maliki urged Sunni insurgents to make peace now any hope of restoring Saddam's dictatorship was gone. But many fear his death might prolong the cycle of violence Iraq has known since its creation as a state by imperial Britain after World War I.
Russia blamed Washington for the violence and predicted in a Foreign Ministry statement that Saddam's "hurried and brutal execution ... will further deepen the schism in Iraqi society".
State television showed the head of Saddam's tribe, Ali al-Nida of the Albu Nasir, and Tikrit's regional governor of the signing a letter agreeing to take the body from the Government and bury it immediately in Awja.
It showed them checking the shrouded body and closing the coffin before it was loaded on to the back of a pick-up truck and driven to a waiting helicopter.
Governor Mohammed al-Qaisi told Reuters the funeral, after the body had been bathed and dressed according to Muslim ritual, was attended by a few officials and relatives. It lasted 25 minutes.
US and Iraqi troops kept a close guard.
Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, killed by US troops six months before their father was captured near Tikrit in December 2003, also lie in Awja, in a family plot in the cemetery. Their father's grave is dug into the floor of an octagonal, domed building he had built in the 1980s for religious festivals.
Men came in groups of several dozen to pay their respects by the mound of fresh clay, with a gravestone at head and foot and a large photograph, propped on a chair, of a younger, smiling Saddam wearing his trademark black fedora hat.
"All we can do now is take it out against the Americans and the Government," another mourner said. More than 70 people were killed in car bomb attacks on Shiites after Saturday's hanging.
The Government had said Saddam's body might lie in a secret grave for fear the site could become a shrine and focal point for Baathist rebels. A relative said the family planned to found a "presidential library" and religious school on the spot.
"This will honour Saddam Hussein," Muayed al-Hazaa said.
Iraqis and much of the world had already been transfixed by film shown on state television of Saddam standing in a noose on a gallows once used by his own secret police. The web footage was more graphic, showing him drop as he begins the second verse of the profession of faith: "I bear witness that Muhammad ... "
Before that, voices are heard chanting "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada" for the cleric whose Mehdi Army militia is widely blamed by Sunnis for death squad killings ravaging society.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has seen his fragile authority among fellow Shiites such as Sadr enhanced after he forced through Saddam's execution just four days after the appeal court upheld his conviction for crimes against humanity for killing Shiites.
Maliki urged Sunni insurgents to make peace now any hope of restoring Saddam's dictatorship was gone. But many fear his death might prolong the cycle of violence Iraq has known since its creation as a state by imperial Britain after World War I.
Russia blamed Washington for the violence and predicted in a Foreign Ministry statement that Saddam's "hurried and brutal execution ... will further deepen the schism in Iraqi society".
Reuters
News 
