Thousands of Sunni Arabs vented their anger today over Saddam Hussein's execution as the Iraqi government promised an investigation into illicitly filmed footage of Shi'ite officials taunting him on the gallows.
A court official said he nearly halted the hanging over the jeering, which has inflamed sectarian passions in a nation already on the brink of civil war. Data showed civilian deaths hit a new record in December and were over 12,000 in 2006.
The official also challenged government claims those who filmed the event were guards, saying they were senior officials.
In the video, widely seen on the Internet, observers chant the name of Shi'ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr as Saddam stands on the scaffold, a convicted mass killer appearing dignified in contrast to the uproar below him.
But the government adviser who announced the investigations on Monday into the taunts and filming, accused the opposition of using them to deflect attention from Saddam's crimes: "This is an artificial uproar," Sami al-Askari told state television.
"They cannot say this court has been unjust and so they take this mistake and forget Saddam deserved to be executed," he said.
"Saddam was treated well in court and on the scaffold. No one beat him or insulted him, yet Saddam tortured many Iraqis, executed thousands and buried them in mass graves."
By rushing through the execution just four days after the former president's appeal failed, over the reservations of the US ambassador who urged a two-week delay, Iraq's prime minister Nuri al-Maliki made good on a promise to fellow Shi'ites that Saddam would not live to see 2007.
But a moderate lawmaker from Saddam's Sunni community said the uncensored images of the hasty hanging were a blow to Mr Maliki's calls for national reconciliation.
Prosecutor Munkith al-Faroon, who can be heard appealing for order on the Internet video, said he threatened to leave the room if the jeering did not stop. That would have halted the execution as a prosecution observer must be present by law.
"I threatened to leave," Mr Faroon said. "They knew that if I left, the execution could not go ahead."
As US president George Bush prepares a new strategy for a war in which the 3,000th soldier died at the weekend, Interior Ministry data showed at least 1,930 civilians died in political violence in December, almost certainly an underestimate.
Another 45 bodies were found around Baghdad today, police said, most apparently victims of the kind of sectarian death squads that are tearing Iraqi society apart.
Saddam's grave in his native village, Awja, drew thousands more mourners today, as it has each day since he was buried there in the dead of night early on Sunday.
Thousands of people marched in nearby Tikrit and in the northern city of Mosul, carrying portraits of Saddam and banners proclaiming him a martyr. In Samarra, Sunni mourners prayed at a shrine venerated principally by Shi'ites that was destroyed by a bomb in February, unleashing the present sectarian bloodbath.