SADDAM HUSSEIN will be hanged within 30 days if he loses his appeal, Bassam Ridha, an adviser to Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, said yesterday.

The appeal, due to start within a month, will be heard before a chamber of nine judges and could take several months to reach a conclusion. Mr Ridha said that if the panel did not overturn the death sentence, the decision would be ratified by the three-man presidency council and transferred to the Justice Ministry to carry out the execution.

The ministry can execute Saddam even if the council decides not to approve it — an outcome considered highly unlikely. Saddam had expressed a preference to be executed by firing squad, but this will not be granted.

Mr Ridha said that the ministry often requested additional security from the Prime Minister’s office for the event. The identities of the hangmen were kept secret.

Executions were suspended during the occupation of Iraq in 2003, but started again when the country regained its sovereignty the following year. Until now, hangings have taken place in secrecy at Iraqi prisons. The last execution was on September 6, when 27 prisoners were put to death in Baghdad.

It is not yet clear whether the execution of Saddam would be open to the public, or whether it would be televised. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” Mr Ridha said, adding that he was sure that it would not be hard to find a hangman. “For Saddam, it will be easy because so many people want to kill him.”

The Americans poured millions of dollars into the tribunal, hoping that it would be a modern-day Nuremberg trial. But at times, the proceedings resembled a circus.

Saddam bolted from the courtroom or boycotted sessions. He even went on an 18-day hunger strike. His outbursts weathered the assassination of three of his lawyers and the replacement of the original judge.

The trial began stormily when he denounced the court’s legitimacy. The next day the lawyer of one of his co-defendants was abducted in Baghdad and murdered by suspected Shia militiamen. A few days later, another member of the defence team was killed by unidentified gunmen. In June, the No 2 on the defence team was also murdered.

As the defendants’ legal team boycotted the proceedings in protest, the court appointed its own lawyers to argue their case. At one point Saddam called a quaking defence lawyer an “enemy of the State”, which was seen as an order to his henchmen to target the man.

Legal experts differ greatly on what will be the trial’s legacy. Its record was tarnished when its first judge stepped down and his successor removed his name after coming under investigation over whether he had belonged to the Baath party. The defence was not allowed to question some prosecution witnesses, whose testimony was presented in statements. Judge Rahman also terminated Saddam’s defence without warning.

Some argue that the documentary evidence is overwhelmingly against Saddam, despite the court’s erratic performance. Others say that the trial was a missed opportunity for holding a tyrant accountable.

Nehal Buhta, the international legal expert at Human Rights Watch, said the prosecution was woefully unprepared. He said that they failed to document whether Saddam’s revolutionary court, which sentenced the Dujail victims to death, was in fact a summary court. “It’s a tragedy that we are having to debate the fairness of the trial of Saddam Hussein,” he told The Times.

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