Concern has been expressed all over the globe following another blundered execution in Iraq in which the half-brother of Saddam Hussein was decapitated by the hangman's noose early this morning.
An Iraqi government spokesman confirmed at a news conference this morning that Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former head of intelligence, and Awad al-Bander, former judge on his Revolutionary Court, were hanged for crimes against humanity.
Their execution came 16 days after that of the ousted Iraqi president, who, thanks to mobile phone footage of the incident, was seen and heard being verbally abused by onlookers as he walked to meet his fate.
"The two convicts have been hanged to death," the government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told a news conference this morning, before adding that Barzan was decapitated when he was hanged at 3.00am local time.
Saddam's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bander reacts after being sentenced to death during his trial in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad
Clearly conscious of international uproar over sectarian taunts during the illicitly filmed hanging of Saddam, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh insisted at a news conference there was "no violation of procedure."
"The convicts were not subjected to any mistreatment," he said describing the beheading by the rope as a rare mishap. "Their rights were not violated. There was no chanting."
However, journalists were shown footage of the event afterwards, in which they could see the decapitation of Barzan and his headless body dropping to the ground.
The executions have been condemned by the Irish Government and by the UN, whose human rights chief Louise Arbour said that the death sentence could be seen as denying the "right to life," a key element of the Convention on Civil and Political Rights to which Iraq is a signatory.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said he backed an Italian-led campaign for the United Nations to agree to a global moratorium on capital punishment.
"I believe in our European values and I take this occasion to thank Italy for all the initiatives that it announced so that, in the framework of the United Nations, we can work together to put an end to the death penalty," he said.
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, who called the "manner" of Saddam's hanging "unacceptable", said Britain was opposed to capital punishment but it remained a sovereign choice for Iraq.
Barzan (55) was a feared figure in Iraq at the head of the intelligence service in the 1980s. Bander presided over the Revolutionary Court that sentenced 148 Shia men and youths to death after an assassination attempt on Saddam in the town of Dujail in 1982.
With Saddam, they were convicted on November 5th. Barzan ran the Mukhabarat intelligence service from 1979 to 1983. Witnesses in the trial said he personally oversaw torture, eating grapes as he watched on one occasion, and had a meat grinder for human flesh at his interrogation facility.
Barzan, who was Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva from 1988 to 1997, was captured by US special forces in Baghdad in April 2003.
Prosecutors said Bander sentenced some of the men from Dujail after they had already been killed, and that among those sentenced were under-18s who could not legally be executed.
Saddam was hanged on December 30th in a dawn execution rushed through four days after the failure of their appeal and on the first day of the Eid al-Adha holiday.
After Saddam was hanged amid sectarian taunts captured on film, the United Nations urged Iraq to reconsider further death sentences.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, an opponent of capital punishment, said last week he thought there should be a delay in executing the other two condemned men. Mr Talabani left the country yesterday to visit Syria.
The governor of Saddam's home province, Salahaddin, said Barzan would be buried in the cemetery at Awja, near Tikrit, where Saddam was born and buried two weeks ago.