There’s been a rash of mainstream media stories expressing sorrow at the passing of Saddam Hussein, but this one in the Daily Mail takes the prize: Daughter denied final call to Saddam. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

The pictures of his execution by balaclava-clad figures - and the taunts that accompanied it - have provoked revulsion around the world.

And today we can reveal the final indignity suffered by Saddam Hussein as he went to the gallows: he was forbidden to take one last phone call from his daughter.

Raghad, 38, told yesterday how she begged the International Red Cross to intervene and press his captors to allow her to say goodbye. “But they wouldn’t let me talk to him. He was probably never even told of my request,” she said.

“All I wanted was to tell him I miss him and love him as a father. My call was not allowed.”

Last night the Red Cross spokesperson for Iraq, Nada Doumani, told The Mail on Sunday: “Raghad called us late last Friday when she heard from lawyers that her father’s personal possessions had been collected. She knew it was the end. We have helped with the delivery of parcels and letters between them over the past two-and-a-half years but this time we could only pass on her request.”

Raghad’s complaint will fuel the controversy surrounding Saddam’s last moments, when spectators called out the name of his enemy Moqtada al-Sadr and urged Saddam to ‘go to hell’. Despite the promise of an inquiry by the Iraqi authorities, the enduring image of the execution is of a baying lynch mob and a dignified, even heroic, Saddam.

In 1996, Saddam’s monstrous daughter Raghad enticed her defector husband to return to Iraq, where he was swiftly murdered by her father’s goons. I wonder if he was allowed to call his relatives before being killed?