Saddam buried near Tikrit

Saddam Hussein was buried early today in his home village of Awjah in northern Iraq after he was hanged for crimes against humanity, a member of his family told AFP.

"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.