IRAQ’S fallen dictator Saddam Hussein would be hanged by the end of January, an adviser to the country’s Prime Minister predicted yesterday, while Shia citizens demanded that his execution should be televised.

“I don’t think it will drag on beyond January of next year,” Haider al-Abadi, an MP who is a confidant of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said.

Saddam, 69, was sentenced to death on Sunday for ordering a brutal crackdown that claimed the lives of 148 Shia from the village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after he had survived a 1982 assassination attempt.

Iraq’s high tribunal also gave the death penalty to Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother, and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, the head of the ousted regime’s Revolutionary Court who recommended that the 148 Dujailis be killed.

Taha Yassin Ramadan, Saddam’s former vice-president, received a life sentence, while three Baath party officials from Dujail received up to 15 years and a fourth, more junior, figure was cleared.

Iraqi law includes an automatic appeal for death and life sentences. A nine-judge appellate chamber will start to review Saddam’s case within 30 days.

The high tribunal will forward its judicial ruling to the appellate chamber in ten days. Then the prosecution and defence have 20 days to submit their arguments.

The appellate chamber has no deadline for issuing a decision, but if it upholds the verdict, Saddam, al-Tikriti and al-Bandar will be executed within 30 days.

Mr al-Abadi was confident that the chamber would complete its review within a month.

“Everyone is eager to have Saddam executed . . . It is important that we make these people supporting him feel there is no hope [that he will come back] so the killings and the bombings stop,” he told The Times.

Saddam’s execution will probably take place inside an Iraqi prison in the presence of government officials and private citizens whose families suffered under his reign, an official said.

The prospect of the man whose regime is said to have executed more than 300,000 people walking to the gallows in private caused people to seethe in Baghdad’s Shia bastion, Sadr City. Iraqis in this slum of 2.5 million people, the power base for the fundamentalist cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, wanted Saddam’s hanging to be televised or carried out in a city square.

“We want him to be executed in Firdoos Square and we wish the same fate for Bush. We hope that he is judged the same way because of the destruction he caused in Iraq,” Raad Sahdi, a 33-year-old teacher, said.

“We want to watch the last drop of life exit his body. We want him executed in public in front of the martyr families. If it is done in secret, we will protest and demand . . . the resignation of the Government,” 31-year-old Salam Mohamad said.

Members of Hojatoleslam al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, the force blamed widely for death squad attacks on Sunnis, were manning checkpoints in Sadr City despite a curfew.

“I don’t care if he’s executed publicly or secretly because he will die each minute from now until his death, and he will feel the same feeling as his victims,” Ahmed Aboudi, a Mahdi Army fighter, said.

Mr al-Abadi said it was unlikely that the hanging would be televised. Since the Iraqi Government reinstated the death penalty in 2004, 50 people have been hanged, all inside prisons.

Mr al-Abadi, who lost three of his own brothers to Saddam’s regime, feared a televised execution would be provocative. “I’m worried about the new Iraq’s image to the outside world. I don’t think we want to make him a martyr . . . we don’t want to encourage violence.”

Despite the curfew to stave off violence in response to the verdict, a Sunni mosque was burnt down by Shia militants in southwestern Baghdad, Iraq’s Islamic Party said.

North of Baghdad, a US army helicopter crashed, killing two soldiers in Saddam’s home province of Salahaddin yesterday. The military said there was no evidence that it had come under fire.

• Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, is expected to resign in the near future, the White House said.

  The Times is the only British newspaper to maintain a full-time Baghdad bureau

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