Iraqi Arrested in Saddam Hanging Video

An Iraqi carries a picture of the country's former president Saddam Hussein while waiting in a crowd of people visiting the burial site in Ouja, 115 kilometers (70 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2007. Sunni Muslims, angered by Saddam's execution and the way his hanging was carried out, have taken to the streets in recent days in mainly peaceful demonstrations in Sunni enclaves across the country. (AP Photo/Bassim Daham) (Bassim Daham - AP)

In Washington, a lawyer for Bandar asked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to block the U.S. military from transferring custody of the condemned man to Iraqi authorities. U.S. courts have so far declined to intervene.

U.N.'s human rights chief Louise Arbour appealed to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to prevent the execution of Ibrahim and al-Bandar, saying she was concerned with "the fairness and impartiality" of their trials.

As the hanging video swirled, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a close ally of al-Maliki, hotly denied that he was involved in taking video of the execution. He spoke to CNN after the announcement of the arrest of the unnamed official in connection with the case.

The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing a prosecutor in the Saddam trial present at the execution, that al-Rubaie had recorded the execution with a cell phone.

Al-Rubaie said neither he nor any other Iraqi official had shot and leaked the video to Al-Jazeera television and Web sites. Instead, he suggested Sunni insurgents infiltrated the guard force and took the pictures.

According to the Times, Munqith al-Faroon, the prosecutor, told the newspaper "one of two men he had seen holding a cell phone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein's last moments up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki's national security adviser."

But Al-Faroon, in an interview with The Associated Press, denied the report. "I am not accusing Mowaffak al-Rubaie, and I did not see him taking pictures," he said.

"But I saw two of the government officials who were...present during the execution taking all the video of the execution, using the lights that were there for the official taping of the execution," he added in a phone interview. "They used mobile phone cameras. I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces."

On its Web site, the Times later noted denials by al-Rubaie and al-Faroon.

As the storm over the handling of the execution gained strength, Caldwell was among several U.S. officials who suggested displeasure with the conduct of the execution.

"If you are asking me: 'Would we have done things differently?' Yes, we would have. But that's not our decision. That's the government of Iraq's decision," Caldwell said.

Saddam, Ibrahim and al-Bandar were sentenced to death for the 1982 killings of 148 Shiite Muslims in the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after a failed assassination plot against Saddam. They were convicted on Nov. 5, and the verdict was upheld by an appeals court on Dec. 26.

Saddam was hanged in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazamiyah. During his regime, Saddam had numerous dissidents and opponents executed in the facility, located in a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi capital's most important Shiite shrine _ the Imam Kazim shrine.

As he faced his own death on the gallows, Caldwell said, Saddam "was courteous, as he always had been, to his U.S. military police guards."

The spokesman said Saddam's demeanor changed "at the prison facility when the Iraqi guards were assuming control of him, but he was still dignified toward us.

"He spoke very well to our military police, as he always had. And when getting off there at the prison site, he said farewell to his interpreter.

"He thanked the military police squad, the lieutenant, the squad leader, the medical doctor we had present, and the colonel that was on site."