By Gboyega Akinsamni with agency report, 12.27.2006

In his pronouncement yesterday, Chief judge Aref Shahin said Saddam's death by hanging "must be implemented within 30 days," adding that "From tomorrow, any day could be the day of implementation."

On November 5, an Iraqi court had sentenced Saddam to the gallows for ordering the 1982 killings following an attempt on his life.

The only option left for the former despot now is the ratification of the appeal court's ruling by President Jalal Talabani and Iraq's two vice presidents as specified by Iraqi law.

Talabani is not well disposed to the death penalty but had in the past delegated a vice president to sign an execution order on his behalf and this has been legally accepted.

However, Raed Juhi, a spokesman for the High Tribunal court that convicted Saddam, said the judicial system would ensure that Saddam is executed even if Talabani and the two vice presidents do not ratify the decision.

"We'll implement the verdict by the power of the law," Juhi said. He did not elaborate further.

The appeal court also upheld death sentences for Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother and intelligence chief during the Dujail killings, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, which issued the death sentences against the Dujail residents.
The appeal court concluded that the sentence of life imprisonment given to former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan was too lenient and returned his file to the High Tribunal. Ramadan was convicted of premeditated murder in the Dujail case.

"We demand that he be sentenced to death," said Shahin, the appeals judge.

At his trial, Saddam argued that the Dujail residents who were killed had been convicted in a legitimate Iraqi court for trying to assassinate him in 1982.

Saddam was ejected from the courtroom repeatedly for political harangues, and his half brother once showed up in long underwear and sat with his back to the judges.

The nine-month trial inflamed Iraq's political divide, however, and three defence lawyers and a witness were murdered during the course of its 39 sessions.

Saddam is in the midst of a second trial charging him with genocide and other crimes during a 1987-88 military crackdown on Kurds in northern Iraq. An estimated 180,000 Kurds died during the operation.
Saddam was found hiding with an unfired pistol in a hole in the ground near his home village north of Baghdad in December 2003, eight months after he fled the capital ahead of advancing American troops.