Three prison officials have been arrested for mocking Saddam Hussein in his last minutes alive and posting a video of his execution on the internet, The Times has learnt.

A senior Iraqi official also revealed that Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, obtained direct approval from the White House to go ahead with the hanging.

US officials in Iraq initially blocked the push to kill the jailed dictator within days of his appeal against the death sentence failing. “They had said it was impossible to execute Saddam so soon. They had said no,” the senior official said. “The other option was to contact the White House to get permission.”

Mr al-Maliki spoke to someone “very high up”, according to the official, telling them: “You need to give him us. He belongs to us.”

American officials said that Washington had used military and diplomatic channels in Baghdad to express “concerns” about the timing of Saddam’s execution, which took place hours before the start of the Eid al-Adha religious festival.

President Bush was not personally involved, said Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman. “The President’s focus was not on the specific steps in that process,” he said.

The account suggested that the White House had the power to delay the hanging until after Eid, which ended at dawn this morning, but relented under pressure from Mr al-Maliki.

Tony Blair joined the criticism yesterday of the handling of Saddam’s execution, backing the Iraqi inquiry into the hanging. However, a Downing Street spokesman declined to endorse John Prescott’s comments that the scenes around the gallows had been “deplorable”.

The Iraqi Government tried to repair some of the damage yesterday caused by the release of the macabre video, taken on a mobile phone, which has sparked pro-Saddam rallies in Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul, as well as a worldwide outcry.

Three of those present, all prison officials, have been arrested since Tuesday. “Two of them were chanting and one was filming with a mobile,” said a government official. All 20 men in the gallows chamber, including the 14 witnesses, had been questioned.

But the inquiry has left some loose ends after one witness, Munqith Faroun, the prosecutor, said that he had watched two government members film the hanging even though all present were supposed to have surrendered their mobile phones. He denied that one was Mowaffq al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser.

The Iraqi source ruled out the possibility that any senior officials had posted the grisly footage on the internet, and the government members will not be questioned further.

Those arrested were from Sadr City, stronghold of the radical Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, whose name they chanted moments before Saddam’s death.

Sadiq al-Rikabi, political adviser to Mr al-Maliki, said that the motive of the guard who filmed the hanging was unclear. “Now we will try to find out whether he did this on purpose, whether anyone asked him to take the footage, or did he do this not recognising the consequences,” he said.

Mr al-Rikabi reiterated that the Prime Minister had wanted the execution of the former dictator to be a sombre affair. “The PM did not want revenge; he wanted to implement justice,” he said. He said of the arrested guard: “He will pay the price”. The recording, which has been distributed widely across the internet, has brought widespread condemnation of the manner of Saddam’s execution and has proved a big embarrassment for the Iraqi Government.

Saddam’s co-accused, his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, and Awad al-Bandhar, a revolutionary court judge, are due to be hanged in the coming days for crimes against humanity. The Iraqi Government is at pains to make sure it does not have a replay of last weekend’s debacle.

A spokesman for the US military insisted that Saddam’s execution would have been handled differently if it had taken place under American control.

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