A senior official of Salahudin province, whose capital city Tikrit is hometown of former President Saddam Hussein, said on Saturday that the province will not send representatives to attend the burial of Saddam in Baghdad.

"The government told us to send provincial representatives, including the governor or his deputy and the leader of Saddam's tribe to the burial of executed Saddam," Abdullah Jabara, deputy governor of Salahudin province told Xinhua by telephone.

"I answered that we will not go to Baghdad unless they agree to give us his body to hold a suitable funeral for him and bury him in Uwja village beside his sons Uday and Qusay," Jabara said.

At dawn on Saturday, the first day of four-day Islamic festival Eid al-Adha, or Greater Bairam, Saddam was executed by hanging, the U.S.-backed Iraqi TV Al Hurra reported.

Meanwhile, Jabara said that the city of Tikrit, capital city of Salahudin province, was under curfew and security forces intensified patrols.

However, security measures did not prevent people in many cities of Salahudin province from taking to the streets and protesting Saddam's execution.

A Xinhua correspondent reported in Tikrit that hundreds of angry people took to the streets and headed to the city's Grand Mosque, a huge mosque built by Saddam.

The demonstrators raised posters of Saddam Hussein and angrily chanted slogans slamming the execution of the ousted leader.

"This is an unjust and aggressive act toward many Iraqis," Muhammad Tawfiq, a demonstrator, told Xinhua.

"The execution itself on the first day of Eid al-Adha is a violation of rights of millions of Iraqi Sunnis," Tawfiq said, adding that "this is an insult at Sunnis. We condemned this cowered act."

In Baiji, Dour, Samarra, Yathrib and other cities of the predominantly Sunni Salahudin province, thousands of people also gathered for protests.

However, hundreds of people in the only two Shiite cities of Balad and Dujail in the province celebrated the execution.

Dujail, some 60 km north of Baghdad, was the scene of the execution of some 148 Shiites following a failed assassination attempt against Saddam by followers of an Iranian-backed Dawa party in the 1980-1988 war with Iran.

On Nov. 5, a panel of five Iraqi judges sentenced Saddam, his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar to death by hanging for crimes against Shiites in Dujail village.

The Iraqi appellate court announced on Tuesday that the court had upheld the death sentence for Saddam.

Source: Xinhua