Saddam's sons to be buried in Tikrit
The US military handed over the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons, Oday and Qusay, to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, which is taking the corpses for burial in their hometown of Tikrit, the US Army said today.
“The Red Crescent will take them to Tikrit and from there somebody will hopefully claim the bodies,” said Cpl Todd Pruden.
Pruden later sought to backtrack, saying the issue of the bodies was being handled by the Coalition Provisional Authority. He did not deny what he had said earlier.
The CPA, the US administrative organisation for Iraq, could not confirm the report, said Naheed Mehta, a spokeswoman for the authority. She would not, however, deny that the Red Crescent had taken the bodies from US custody.
The bodies of the two men were being held in refrigeration at the US base at Baghdad International Airport where they were prepared for burial according to western – not Muslim – custom by military morticians.
The brothers were killed by American forces in a huge and lengthy gun battle July 22 in Mosul, the northernmost Iraqi big city.
The handling of the bodies, including autopsies conducted by the military, had set up a controversy throughout Iraq. Muslim tradition calls for bodies not to be embalmed or in any way retouched and for them to be buried before sundown on the day of death.
The brothers’ faces were heavily restored by the US military morticians and western reporters were allowed to view them and take still pictures and videotape.
Those images were flashed across the Arab world by satellite broadcasters. The US military obviously was trying to convince sceptical Iraqis the men were dead.
Still pictures of the brothers released shortly after their deaths had raised doubts that Oday and Qusay were the men in the pictures.
US military sources in Tikrit expressed concern about the return of the men to the city, where the former ruling family is still revered for granting huge economic and political favours to the residents of its hometown. Large numbers of the Saddam family clan still live in the city.
The Tigris River city remains one of the least pacified areas in the country, sitting squarely in the so-called ”Sunni Triangle” north and west of Baghdad, where remnants of Saddam loyalists have conducted a guerrilla war against American occupation forces.
If the pair are buried in Tikrit, the military sources said, it was feared the gathering for the interment could get out of hand, with a huge backlash against the big US troop presence in and around the city.
On July 29, in one of four audiotapes attributed to Saddam in just more than two weeks, the voice purporting to be the ousted dictator acknowledged the death of his sons and said he was glad they were martyrs to the cause of Iraq.
