Through his black hood, Awad al-Bandar’s lips are still moving in prayer. Barzan al-Tikriti stands beside him, immobile, in an identical orange suit. The double trapdoor swings open. Both ropes jerk to a halt, but al-Tikriti’s body keeps falling, the empty noose swinging in the air.

Even though we knew what was coming it was still a shock: a judicial decapitation live on video. Just when you thought that every ounce of drama had been wrung from this ill-starred judicial process.

The last moments of Saddam Hussein’s half-brother and the chief of his Revolutionary Court are a gruesome piece of footage, showing what appears to have been a miscalculation by the executioner, one of six men in balaclavas. The Iraqi Government seems to have screened the film — only once, and only to a small number of journalists — to avoid the outcry that built throughout the day across the Arab world about Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti’s last moments.

London and Washington voiced dismay. Tony Blair’s spokesman said that the manner of the execution was wrong. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, was disappointed that the accused were not given greater dignity.

Al-Tikriti, 55, was no stranger to violent and gruesome death. Head of the Baathist regime’s feared intelligence service from 1979 to 1983, he was found guilty of supervising the round-up and execution of 148 Shia villagers in Dujail in 1982 after a failed assassination attempt against Saddam. Witnesses at the trial claimed that he personally oversaw torture sessions, eating grapes as he watched one victim being brutalised.

Al-Tikriti, the five of clubs in America’s “Most Wanted” deck of cards, was captured by special forces in Baghdad in April 2003. Last year, along with Saddam, Judge Awad al-Bandar and others, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity. He remained loyal to Saddam to the end.

Al-Tikriti and al-Bandar were buried alongside Saddam near Tikrit

Yesterday the Iraqi Government appeared intent on preventing a repeat of Saddam’s execution, which was marked by mocking and hostile chanting filmed by onlookers. Rather than giving the condemned men special treatment, as Saddam had received, they dressed them in standard execution boiler suits and hoods.

Basam Ridha al-Hussaini, an adviser to Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, and one of the 14 witnesses, said that after both men declined to make a will or to pray they were taken to the gallows in the same room where Saddam was executed a fortnight ago.

This time no senior government officials were present and no mobile phones were permitted. Witnesses were required to sign a document promising there would be no ethnic chanting or insults. At 3am the convicts fell through the trapdoors.

The video of the aftermath shows al-Tikriti’s body lying, stomach down on the floor with al-Bandar’s body appearing to be hanging over him. On the floor to the right a few feet away, lies a shapeless black bundle with the head inside it.

“We put the head next to the body and it will be given to the families,” Mr al-Hussaini said. The two men were later buried in the same hall as Saddam.

Although the proceedings seemed more orderly than for Saddam’s hanging, there is no means of knowing if anything was said in the execution chamber, because the video was without sound. Iraqi officials say it will not be made public.

The distance of the drop was intended to ensure a quick death. Officials denied they had miscalculated, saying that al-Tikriti was heavily built and that such beheadings, although uncommon, did happen. “It was an act of God,” Mr al-Hussaini said.

But across Iraq and further afield there was outrage about the decapitation. Issam Ghazzawi, a Jordanian lawyer who saw Barzan on Friday, said: “His head was cut off after he was hanged to mutilate his body in a barbaric act of revenge.”

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