Saddam's half brother, Barzan Ibrahim, a former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were originally scheduled to hang with Saddam. But their execution was delayed until after Islam's Eid al-Adha holiday, which ends today for Iraq's majority Shiites.

The three men were sentenced to death for the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims from the town of Dujail after a failed 1982 assassination against Saddam in the northern city.

Report denied: Also today, an Iraqi prosecutor who attended Saddam's execution denied a report that he had accused the country's national security adviser of possible responsibility for the leaked video of the former dictator being hanged.

Within the country, Saddam's execution and the way it was conducted have provoked anger among Sunni Muslims, who have taken to the streets in mainly peaceful demonstrations across the country.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki yesterday ordered his Interior Ministry to investigate the video -- who took it and how it reached television and Web sites for public viewing.

The photos showed an ugly scene in Saddam's last moments of life, with taunts and cries of "go to hell" called out before he dropped through the gallows floor and swung dead at the end of a rope.

The official video of the hanging, which never showed Saddam's actual death, was muted and gave the impression of a dignified execution.

The New York Times today reported that prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon told the newspaper "one of two men he had seen holding a cell phone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein's last moments ... was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki's national security adviser."

The Times said it had been unable to reach al-Rubaie for comment.

Al-Faroon told the AP today that there were 14 Iraqi officials, including himself and another prosecutor, as well as three hangmen present at the execution. All the officials, he said, were flown by U.S. helicopter to the execution site.

Bodyguards: The prosecutor said he believed all cell phones had been confiscated before the flight and that some of the officials' bodyguards, who arrived by car, had smuggled the camera phones two officials he had seen taking the video pictures.

"I am not accusing Mowaffak al-Rubaie (the national security adviser), and I did not see him taking pictures," al-Faroon told the AP.

"But I saw two of the government officials who were ... present during the execution taking all the video of the execution, using the lights that were there for the official taping of the execution. They used mobile phone cameras. I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces," al-Faroon said in a telephone interview.

The prosecutor said the two officials were openly taking video pictures, which are believed to be those which appeared on Al-Jazeera satellite television and a Web site within hours of Saddam's death.

Some of the last words Saddam heard, according to the leaked cell phone video, were a chant of "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada," a reference to Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American Shiite cleric, whose Mahdi Army militia is believed responsible for many of this year's killings that have targeted Sunnis and driven many from their homes.

Al-Sadr's father was killed by Saddam. The militant cleric is a key al-Maliki backer.

In other developments:

---U.S. soldiers today detained 23 people suspected of having ties to senior al-Qaida leaders in raids in western Iraq, the military said. The raids took place in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's volatile western Anbar province.

During the raids, three of the suspects detonated an improvised explosive device, then ran into a house. American troops shot one of the suspects, wounding him as he tried to flee, the military said in a statement.

---The Iraqi government said yesterday the number of civilians killed in the violence in Iraq rose sharply over the last three months, accounting for 5,000, or about 40 percent, of the more than 12,000 who died in 2006

In the third full year since the U.S.-led invasion, only about half as many Iraqi soldiers died in 2006 as American troops, the government reported.

But the number of Iraqi security forces killed jumped to 1,539 -- nearly double the American death count of 823 for the year -- when the deaths of police, who conduct paramilitary operations, are added to the number of slain Iraqi soldiers.

The civilian toll of 12,357 coupled with the security force deaths bring the overall figure reported by the ministries of Health, Defense and Interior to 13,896 -- 162 more than the tally kept by The Associated Press.

The AP count, assembled from its daily news reports, was always believed to be substantially lower than the actual number of deaths because the news cooperative does not have daily access to official accounting by the Iraqi ministries. Many deaths were thought to have gone unreported by AP.