| "Saddam Hussein has been buried today at 4 am (0630 IST) in a place that was constructed during his regime in the centre of Awjah," said Musa Faraj, one of Saddam's relatives from the area. |
| Faraj said the building where Saddam was buried was a hall usually used for condolence meetings in Awjah, 180 km north of Baghdad. |
| He said the burial was attended by the governor of Salaheddin province, Hamed al-Shakti and Ali al-Nida, chief of Saddam's tribe of Albu Nasir and many other members of the tribe. |
| Shakti and Nida were part of a delegation that had gone to Baghdad yesterday to receive the former dictator's corpse after he was hanged. |
| Faraj said security forces had sealed off the town of Tikrit, the stronghold of Saddam's supporters, since yesterday so that "nobody could participate in the burial" at Awjah, just 4 km south of Tikrit. |
| Saddam was born in Awjah, a bastion of the Albu Nasir tribe and part of Salaheddin province. His sons Uday and Qusay, killed by US troops in Mosul in July 2003, are also buried in Awjah. |
| The former strongman was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on November 5 for the killing of 148 men and boys in the Shiite village of Dujail in 1982 after an attempt was made there to assassinate him. |
| The death sentence was confirmed by a judicial panel on December 26, and carried out at dawn yesterday inside a former torture centre used by Saddam's intelligence service in the Shiite district of Kadhimiyah in northern Baghdad. |
| Iraqi Shiites, persecuted during Saddam's 24-year rule, feted his demise, dancing and cracking off bursts of automatic fire, while Sunni militants slammed the US-backed government for hanging their hero. |
| But in the hours after Saddam was hanged, at least 77 people were killed in a series of attacks, mostly against Shiite civilians. |
| A car bomb exploded in a fish market in the Shiite town of Kufa, and a triple bombing ripped through a Shiite neighbourhood in Baghdad. |
Top Section
Explore Business Standard