Aide wishes he were executed with Saddam

Two of Saddam Hussein's top aides were taken from their cells and told they were going to be executed on the same day as the former Iraqi dictator, and they have been mourning his death while awaiting their own delayed executions, their lawyer said Sunday.

Barzan Ibrahim _ Saddam's half-brother and former intelligence chief _ and Awad Hamed al-Bandar _ former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court _ were both sentenced to die after being found guilty along with Saddam of involvement in the killing of nearly 150 Shiites in the town of Dujail in 1982.

Issam Ghazawi, a member of Saddam's defense team during the last two years, told The Associated Press he has power of attorney from the two, along with two other top Saddam aides, to follow up on their cases and represent some of them in Iraqi courts.

He met individually with the men last Wednesday at an unspecified location in Baghdad where they are being held in U.S. custody.

Ibrahim told Ghazawi that on the day of Saddam's execution, the prisoners were escorted from their cells and told they were going to be executed.

"The Americans took me and al-Bandar from our cells on the same day of Saddam's execution to an office inside the prison at 1 a.m. They asked us to collect our belongings because they intend to execute us at dawn," Ghazawi said, quoting Ibrahim.

Ghazawi said the two men were also told to write out their wills.

Al-Bandar and Ibrahim were taken back to their prison cells nearly nine hours later, according to Ghazawi. "Their execution should be commuted under such circumstances because of the psychological pain they endured as they waited to hang," he said.

Al-Bandar told Ghazawi that he "wished to have been executed with President Saddam," the lawyer said. Ibrahim "was in the worst condition. He kept crying over the death of his brother and said it was a great loss for the family and the Arab world."

Ghazawi also met last Wednesday with Taha Yassin Ramadan, Saddam's vice president who was sentence to life in prison, and Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister under Saddam who is being held indefinitely.

All of the men are "in bad shape, saddened by the news of President Saddam Hussein's death," Ghazawi said. "They were weeping and they made me cry with them. They fear their own fates following the execution of the president."

Both were originally scheduled to hang with Saddam on Dec. 30.

Their execution was delayed until after Islam's Eid al-Adha holiday, which ended Wednesday for Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims. Ghazawi said he has had no contact with them since last week, and had no information on when they would be executed.

The Iraqi government has insisted that it will go ahead with the executions, despite calls from the United Nations and elsewhere that it refrain.

An unauthorized video of Saddam's execution, showing him being taunted on the gallows and his body dangling at the end of a rope, has ignited protests by Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs in several Iraqi cities.

On Sunday, new U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in letter addressed to Iraq's U.N. ambassador, urged the Iraqi government to grant a stay of execution to "those whose death sentences may be carried out in the near future."

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Saturday defended Saddam's execution.

"The execution of the tyrant was not a political decision, as the enemies of the Iraqi people say. The verdict was implemented after a fair and transparent trial, which the dictator never deserved," al-Maliki said.

Jaafar al-Mousawi, the chief prosecutor in Saddam's Dujail case, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the time for al-Bandar and Barzan's executions "will be determined by the government."

Sami al-Askari, an adviser to al-Maliki, confirmed what al-Mousawi said but declined to give reasons for the delay in the executions, saying only that "no date has been made yet."