Men waved guns and cursed Iraq’s Shia led-government as hundreds paid their respects at the tomb of Saddam Hussein, who was buried yesterday in his home village of al-Awja, outside Tikrit.

“The occupation destroyed the country and butchered its president. Maliki and the other dirty officials executed Saddam for America and Iran and we will take revenge from the Government that is representing Iran in Baghdad,” said Muhammad Daham al- Hassan, a cousin of Saddam’s from the Albu Nassir tribe.

Hassan was just one of the dozens of angry Sunni Arab supporters and relatives from Saddam’s home region who descended on the village where Saddam was born and denounced Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia-led Government.

Their outbursts raised fears that Saddam’s rushed hanging on Saturday morning would ignite a new round of reprisals in a conflict that many experts are already calling a civil war.

“I condemn the way he was executed and I consider it a crime,” said 45-year-old Salam Hassan al-Nasseri, one of Saddam’s clansmen who attended the interment in the village, 80 miles north of Baghdad.

About 2,000 Iraqis also travelled to the village.

People rushed to pay their respects to the fallen dictator, whose last minutes alive were filmed surreptitiously by a Shia spectator and distributed late on Saturday on the internet and television.

Sheikh Ali al-Nida, the head of the Albu Nassir tribe, worried that Saddam’s death would harm attempts to broker a peace between Iraq’s Sunni and Shias, who are already mired in a cycle of tit-for-tat violence.

“Saddam’s execution doesn’t help the reconciliation efforts in the region. Saddam was a symbol for the nation. No one is perfect but he kept Iraq unified,” Sheikh al-Nida said.

Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said that nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air and calling for vengeance.

According to Ahmed Faizi Dhaman Hazaa, a 58-year-old cousin of Saddam’s, the former President’s body arrived in al-Awja on Saturday night. A US helicopter had taken Sheikh al-Nida, his son and a cousin of Saddam’s to pick the body up from Baghdad. They returned a few hours later to Tikrit with the corpse.

Saddam’s body was in a wooden coffin, which was put on the back of an Iraqi truck and taken to al-Awja by a large convoy, including police and Muhammsd al-Qaisi, the Governor of Salahaddin province.

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