The men who were to be hanged alongside Saddam

BAGHDAD: Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, one of Saddam's three half-brothers and a former director of the feared Mukhabarat intelligence service, and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar al-Sadun, former chief judge of the revolutionary court and deputy head of Saddam's office were scheduled to be hanged alongside Saddam on Saturday. But officials informed that they would be hanged after the after the Eid al-Adha holiday, which ends on Thursday.   

Like Saddam, they were sentenced to death for their roles in the massacre of 148 Iraqi Shiites from the village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after a failed attempt on the former dictator's life in 1982.

BARZAN IBRAHIM HASSAN AL-TIKRITI:  Detained on April 16, 2003, he was number 52 on the wanted list issued by US commanders after their March 2003 invasion, and five of clubs in a pack of playing cards issued to troops.

Hot-tempered and secretive, Barzan had a series of rows with other members of Saddam's Tikriti clan, notably the president's elder son, Uday, but family ties meant he was always welcomed back.

A 1988 dispute erupted over Barzan's opposition to the marriage of one of Saddam's daughters to a rival member of the Tikriti clan, Hussein Kamel Hassan, friends said. 

And in 2003, Barzan opposed Saddam's younger son, Qusay, succeeding his father as president.

But despite the disagreements, Barzan remained one of the president's most trusted aides. He managed Saddam's personal fortune until 1995 and is also believed to have coordinated covert purchases in Europe for the regime's prized weapons programmes.

Being Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva from 1988 to 1998 gave him the perfect cover, and he is also believed to have set up arrangements to circumvent the UN sanctions clamped on Iraq after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

He also coordinated Baghdad's intelligence network in Europe and managed Saddam's assets in European banks, according to opponents of the ousted regime.

He returned home in late 1998 after his wife died of cancer. A source close to Barzan said that during this period, he urged Saddam to abolish the ruling Revolution Command Council (RCC) and proposed forming a government of technocrats he himself would head.

Born in 1951, Barzan was still in his teens when he took part in the coup that brought his half-brother into the circles of power. A father of eight, he studied law and political science at Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriyah University.

US officials had characterized him as a member of "Saddam's Dirty Dozen", responsible for much of the torture and murder for which the regime became notorious.

The charges against him dated from when he headed the secret police, from early 1982 to late 1983, at the height of the devastating Iran-Iraq war. He was accused of particapating in the 1982 Dujail massacre.

Barzan had been diagnosed with cancer and a number of calls were made for his release for treatment on humanitarian grounds.

AWAD AHMED AL-BANDAR AL-SADUN was a former chief judge of the revolutionary court and deputy head of Saddam's office.

The 60-year-old Bandar was indicted on July 1, 2004, becoming the first judge to be tried for using his court to carry out political executions since Nazi judges were brought before the Nuremberg trials.

Bandar's lawyer was abducted and executed the day after the trial started on October 19, 2005.

While some accused Bandar of simply having no experience as a judge, as with the Nuremberg cases the main argument revolved around judges' accountability for enforcing unjust laws that were nevertheless "legal".

As such, it was argued that Bandar was "only obeying orders" but the court decided that Bandar's request for execution orders was "in fact an order of murder and not a judgment issued by virtue of the law and in conformity with it."

He was found guilty of "committing a deliberate crime against humanity" and sentenced to death. 

Controversial Italian lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano, a one-time member of Saddam's legal team, said that the prosecution had failed to prove that Bandar's court was a summary court as had been proven at Nuremberg and that as a result there was no basis for a conviction.

Instead, he said, the prosecution only proved that the judge was carrying out the orders of Saddam's government.

Besides being in charge of so-called show trials, Bandar was also accused of sentencing 35 minors to death.

However, he insisted his trials were fair and that he never sentenced minors to die, saying on April 16 that: "The accused had all the the rights and were defended by their lawyers ... I am a judge and my deep conscience does not allow to sentence someone under 20 to death."