Executed Hussein deputy is buried

More than 1,000 Sunni Arabs turned out Tuesday to bury Saddam Hussein’s last vice president, firing guns into the air as a mark of respect, after he was hanged before dawn on the fourth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Taha Yassin Ramadan was the third member of Hussein’s inner circle executed since the deposed president was taken to the gallows Dec. 30 after being convicted of crimes against humanity. The executions come at a time of deepening disaffection among the Sunni minority, which was dominant under Hussein and has driven the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Under mounting American pressure to reach out to Sunnis, Iraq’s Shiite-led Cabinet on Tuesday offered jobs and retirement benefits to former officers whose livelihoods were wiped out when U.S. authorities disbanded Hussein’s security forces in 2003. Many became willing recruits in militant groups, contributing to the violence that has pushed the death toll since the March 20, 2003, invasion to more than 3,200 U.S. forces and an estimated 60,000 Iraqis.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed and a third was wounded Tuesday when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle during a patrol in support of the latest Baghdad security crackdown, the military announced.

Ramadan, a Kurd, had asked to be buried near Hussein in Al Auja, the small northern town where the former leader was born, his lawyers said.

Attorney Badr Awad Bandar, who witnessed the predawn execution, accompanied the body on a U.S. helicopter to Tikrit, where he said Iraqi police draped the national flag over the coffin and drove it to the nearby gravesite. About 1,500 people, most of them members of Hussein’s tribe, received the body at the town’s entrance, saluting its arrival with gunfire, he said.

Ramadan’s remains were placed in a grave next to those of Hussein’s two sons, a grandson and two aides in a garden outside the hall where the late president is buried.

“This is the result of the so-called freedom brought and promoted by the Americans and their allies,” said mourner Mohammed Khatab, a 37-year-old teacher. “It has been four years under the occupation, and the only results we have are destruction, insecurity and the weeping of widows and orphans.”

Ramadan’s lawyers accused the court that tried him of seeking revenge when it upgraded his sentence to death after an appeals court ruled that life in prison was not harsh enough. Human rights groups have also protested the execution, saying evidence against Ramadan was weak. Three other defendants received 15-year prison terms and one was acquitted in the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiite Muslims from the town of Dujayl after an assassination attempt on Hussein.

Elsewhere in Iraq, the execution passed with little comment and appeared to have been handled smoothly. The previous ones caused furors. In late December, grainy video captured on a cellphone showed onlookers taunting Hussein on the gallows. Two weeks later, his half brother and former intelligence chief, Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, was decapitated during his hanging.

This time, an expert was brought in to evaluate the gallows, and Ramadan was weighed to ensure the correct length of rope was used, said Bassam Ridha, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s legal advisor.

As the noose was placed around his neck, Ramadan said two shahadas, the Muslim declaration of faith: “There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” The trapdoor then swung open, and Ramadan dropped to his death at 3:05 a.m., Ridha said.

He refused to disclose the location of the execution.

Co-defense lawyer Arif Izat said the hanging took place at the site where Hussein was executed, a prison at an Iraqi base that once served as Hussein’s military intelligence headquarters.

Twelve hours later, the body was handed over to a representative of Ramadan’s family, Ridha said.

The measures approved by the Iraqi Cabinet on Tuesday offer military officers with the rank of lieutenant colonel and higher the option to reenlist, if there is space for them, or to receive retirement benefits, a government announcement said. It said those with the rank of major and below will be offered jobs in the military or civil service, depending on their qualifications.

Sunni political leaders welcomed the move.

“These officers have been forgotten and their families left to suffer for the past four years,” said Salim Abdullah Jabouri, a Sunni member of parliament. “Hopefully, the experience of these officers will be put into use by the new Iraqi army because, frankly speaking, the current army is very inexperienced.”

The U.S. and Iraq have deployed thousands more troops in Baghdad in the last month to try to quell the violence.

Security officials reported a drop in sectarian killings in the first weeks of the crackdown, though recently the number of bullet-riddled bodies recovered each day has climbed back up. At least 32 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad on Tuesday, still well below the high of more than 50 a day. Two more bodies, both showing signs of torture, were recovered in Kirkuk, police said.

Under orders from radical anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr, Shiite Muslim militiamen, blamed for many of the execution-style killings, have been taking a low profile in the capital since the crackdown began Feb. 13. But car bombings, a hallmark of Sunni insurgents, have persisted across the country, reaching a record 77 in February.

Car bombs accounted for at least 14 of the 21 Iraqis killed in violence Tuesday.

British forces, meanwhile, handed over a key base in Basra to Iraqi forces, calling it a milestone in the transition to full Iraqi control of the southern oil port city.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said last month that Britain would begin withdrawing 1,600 of its 7,000 troops in Iraq.

British troops have now moved to the Basra airport, the largest of their four remaining bases in the area.

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zavis@latimes.com

Times staff writers Said Rifai and Saif Hameed in Baghdad and special correspondents in Baghdad and Tikrit contributed to this report.