Britain's Brown: Saddam's hanging 'deplorable'

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Tony Blair's likely successor as Britain's prime minister on Saturday condemned former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's execution as "deplorable" and "completely unacceptable." Treasury chief Gordon Brown, who is expected to succeed Blair as prime minister this year, said he opposed the death penalty and hoped lessons would be learned from the mistakes made in Saddam's hanging, as well as from other difficulties encountered in Iraq. "Now that we know the full picture of what happened, we can sum this up as a deplorable set of events," Brown said in an interview taped Saturday for the British Broadcasting Corp.'s Sunday AM program.