Former Iraqi vice president to hang

Saddam Hussein's former vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, is to be hanged today for crimes against humanity, according to legal sources who said his lawyers had been summoned yesterday evening.

Badia Aref, a lawyer representing former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz who faces similar charges, said Mr Ramadan's family had asked him to appeal to President Jalal Talabani to stop the execution.

Another legal source said the execution was set for today at dawn and that the family was making a last-minute appeal to the President to stop it.

"The execution is not legal or correct," Mr Aref said, adding there should be a 30-day period between a final sentence being passed and an execution being carried out.

An Iraqi appeals court last week upheld a decision by the High Court to hang Mr Ramadan and a judge said the death sentence could be carried out "at any moment."

Mr Ramadan was sentenced in November to life in jail for his role in the killing of 148 Shi'ites in the town of Dujail in the 1980s for which Saddam and two former aides have already been hanged. But an appeals court recommended that he receive the death penalty and referred the case back to the trial court.

The trial court in November found Mr Ramadan guilty of issuing orders for the systematic detention, torture and killing of men, women and children from Dujail following an attempt on Saddam's life there in 1982.

Saddam was executed at the end of December within days of the sentence being passed, while the other two were executed in January.

While the Iraqi president normally has the power to stop death penalties being carried out, the prosecution and the government say he has no power of veto when it comes to crimes of humanity.

Born in a peasant family in the northern region of Mosul in the late 1930's, Mr Ramadan worked in a bank before joining the Baath party in 1956 and participating in the 1968 coup that returned it to power.

In 1970, he headed a revolutionary court that executed 44 officers for plotting to overthrow the regime.

Mr Ramadan proposed in 2002, before the start of the war with Iraq in 2003, that Saddam and US President George W. Bush settle their differences in a duel with weapons of their choice.

Mr Ramadan was captured in Mosul in August 2003, by Iraqi Kurdish fighters and handed over to US forces.