IRAQ’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, yesterday dismissed rising condemnation of the bungled hanging of Saddam Hussein, saying the former tyrant’s execution was an “internal affair” and warning critical countries that his government could review its relations with them.

It is clear that when the hanging of Saddam’s two henchmen, postponed from last week because of the uproar, finally takes place, care will be taken not to repeat the mistakes.

Saddam’s execution last Saturday has succeeded in the impossible — transforming a man perceived as a monster into an apparent victim.

With the Eid ul-Adha holiday over, the Iraqi Shi’ite population is bracing itself for a violent backlash from Sunni insurgents.

Nor is the arrest of two ministry of justice guards for secretly filming the execution on their mobile phones necessarily the end of the affair. Many Iraqis think it is a cover-up and the guards are scapegoats.

The prosecutor Munkith al-Faroon, who threatened to leave the execution chamber if the jeering did not stop — a move that would have halted the hanging — said: “I saw two government officials present filming the execution.”

It has also emerged that American officials were sufficiently concerned about the rushed execution to have fought with the Iraqi government to have it postponed in the final hours.

They were concerned first, that the proper legal niceties should be observed and second, that the sanctity of the Eid holiday, the most important in the Islamic calendar, should be respected.

To kill Saddam on Saturday, as Maliki wanted, was particularly offensive to Iraq’s Sunnis. It was the first day of their Eid holiday — it starts for Shi’ites the following day — and to execute Saddam on Saturday reinforced the Sunni view that his execution was an act of vengeance by Maliki’s Shi’ite-dominated government.

The moment that clinched Saddam’s fate occurred at midnight on Friday when Maliki went over American heads to the White House.

He spoke to an official — not President George W Bush — about the execution going ahead on Saturday morning. Bush was asleep when Saddam was hanged and had specifically asked not to be woken.

Maliki, himself a Shi’ite who had fled persecution in Iraq, was a man in a hurry. However irrational, there was a fear among the Shi’ite population that there was an American plot to allow Saddam to escape the gallows.

There was also a fear that Sunni insurgents might carry out a terrorist attack, even taking hostages in return for Saddam escaping the gallows.

Maliki was worried, too, about moves by Saddam’s lawyers to have the US courts block the handover of the dictator to Iraqi custody. So he acted with a decisiveness he has rarely shown during his leadership.

The principal legal issue the Americans had urged him to resolve involved a constitutional provision requiring Iraq’s three-man presidency to approve all executions. There was trouble over this because President Jalal Talabani, an Iraqi Kurd, opposes the death penalty and had said he would not sign.

Maliki told the Americans that the chief judge had given him an oral affirmation. At about midnight, after talking to the White House, Maliki signed the decree ordering Saddam to be “hanged by the neck until dead”.

In Jordan, Saddam’s daughters Raghad and Rana had been with close family friends for hours, telephoning lawyers around the world to seek a way of saving their father.

At 05.05am on Saturday, Saddam boarded an American Black Hawk helicopter for the five-minute ride to his death. Ever since the day American forces pulled him out of a hole, cowering and dishevelled three years before, he had been a prisoner at Camp Cropper, the American prison near Baghdad airport.

Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence building in northern Baghdad. Dressed in a dark overcoat and blue trousers, he was first brought before Judge Munir Haddad, one of the nine judges who had upheld his death sentence for the killing of 148 Shi’ite villagers from Dujail, north of Baghdad, in 1982 after an attempt on his life.

A man is never more lonely than at the instant of his death. The legs of many men fail when they catch sight of the noose. Saddam’s remained strong.

With taunts and jeers ringing in his ears, the once all-powerful dictator plunged through the gallows trapdoor at 06.10am, his breath cut short in mid-prayer, his ignominious end illicitly videoed to circulate the globe a few hours later.

Saddam’s body was taken to another place, washed and wrapped in a shroud according to Islamic custom. A Sunni cleric recited the prayers for the dead. Frightened, he had refused to assist at first. “I do not say prayers for kings and leaders,” he said. Faroon said Sunni and Shi’ite officials in attendance prayed together for Saddam’s soul.

Then the body was put in a plain pine coffin and flown in an American helicopter to a US army camp near Tikrit.

Saddam’s wish was to be buried in Ramadi. But the Iraqi government decided this was out of the question: it is the heart of the Sunni insurgency. His family then sought to bury him temporarily in Yemen.

In the end a compromise was reached with American help and Saddam was taken by his tribe and buried at Awja, his birthplace, near the graves of his two sons, Uday and Qusay, who had been killed by American forces.

Hanging is a grim but critically precise art. Often things go wrong. The technical part of the hanging at least worked here.

It is a small mercy because many Iraqis believe everything else about the execution was a disaster, certain to inflame still more the violent sectarian passions destroying Iraq nearly four years after the dictator’s overthrow.