"After a cleric made sure the body was washed and coffined, we prayed on the body and buried it at around 4:00 today," Jabara said. While emotions ran high, there was no "bad behaviour that did not fit the occasion".

Musa Faraj, a relative, said the hall in which Saddam was interred has often been used for condolence meetings in a region north of Baghdad where Saddam sank much of his regime's riches at the expense of the south.

An Iraqi watches video footage of the execution of ousted leader Saddam Hussein on a mobile phone at a shop in central Baghdad. Euphoric mobile telephone users from Baghdad's Sadr City were sharing copies of a grainy video showing Saddam's execution by hanging. [AFP]

"The hall where Saddam is buried shall be renamed as the Hall of Martyr Saddam Hussein," said Munaf Ali Al-Nida, the son of Saddam's tribal chief.

Security forces had sealed off access to Tikrit and imposed curfews on other hotbeds of the Sunni-led insurgency that has raged against US troops and the US-backed Iraqi government since Saddam's ouster in March 2003.

The 69-year-old late leader was born in Awja in 1937. His sons Uday and Qusay, killed during a ferocious gunbattle with US troops in July 2003, are also buried in the village, a bastion of the Albu Nasir tribe.

Three years after American commandos captured him cowering at the bottom of a hole, Saddam was executed by the Iraqi government inside one of his former torture centres in the Shiite district of Kadhimiyah in northern Baghdad.

The end came just five days after a judicial panel upheld a death sentence meted out by an Iraqi court on November 5 for killing 148 men and boys in the Shiite village of Dujail in the 1980s.

His demise was celebrated by many Iraqi Shiites who were persecuted during Saddam's 24-year rule, but Sunni militants slammed the US-backed government for hanging their hero, underscoring the sectarian war threatening to ruin Iraq.

During the final minutes of his hanging the executioners sent Saddam to the gallows with mocking taunts, chanting the name of one of his most bitter opponents as they readied his noose and filmed the scene.

In the latest footage of the execution, apparently captured on a mobile phone and now spreading across the Internet, Shiite witnesses to Saddam's hanging can be heard chanting "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!"

The reference is to Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric whose father and uncle were murdered by Saddam's agents, and who has risen to prominence since Saddam's fall as a politician and militia leader.

Saddam appears to react angrily and sarcastically to the chants, but remains composed during his last minutes.

He appears standing on a dusty steel platform in a dark hall in the north Baghdad military base, his hands bound and a rough hemp rope round his neck.

As Saddam drops through the metal trapdoor his last prayer, the "shahada" or final testimony, is caught short: "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet. There is no God but God and Mohammed..."

Noise erupts in the room as the filmmaker struggles to get a shot of Saddam's face, hanging lifeless to one side. "The tyrant has fallen, damn him!"

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