Saddam Hussein executed in Baghdad

by Dave Clark Sat Dec 30, 6:28 PM ET

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Ousted Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein was hanged inside one of his former torture centres in the final act of a brutal 30-year tragedy that left the stage strewn with tens of thousands of corpses.

Officials who witnessed the execution said the 69-year-old former strongman remained defiant to the last, railing against his Iranian and American enemies and praising the rebels who have pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.

A grainy video showing his corpse draped in a white shroud was shown on private television after the state network broadcast a clip of masked hangmen placing a noose around his neck, cutting away just before his execution.

In the hours after his death, car bombs exploded across Iraq, killing over 70 people, as post-Saddam Iraq continued its headlong plunge into the abyss of civil strife.

Iraqi Shiites, persecuted during Saddam's 24-year rule, feted his demise, dancing and cracking off bursts of automatic fire, while Sunni extremists slammed the US-backed government for hanging their hero.

In the video footage, the ousted despot appeared calm, exchanging words with his burly, leather-jacketed executioners as they wrapped his neck first in black cloth then a thick hemp rope and steered him onto a metal platform.

Saddam was manoeuvred forward firmly but not aggressively by the guards wearing black balaclava-style hoods, the grey-bearded prisoner looking thin inside a dark overcoat over a pressed white shirt but no tie.

"He said he was not afraid of anyone," said Judge Moneer Haddad, a member of the panel of appeal court judges who had confirmed Saddam's conviction for crimes against humanity and who attended the pre-dawn execution.

"It was a terrifying scene. Saddam was in self-control. I was not expecting him to be like that," Haddad told AFP.

"One of the attendants asked him 'are you afraid?' He said 'I have never been afraid as long as I lived. I lived as a mujahedeen and expected death any moment,'" he described.

"We heard the cracks of his neck. It was a horrendous scene," he added. After the execution an ambulance took the body to the heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and US embassy, Haddad said.

With that Saddam -- the swaggering sadist who slaughtered Iraq's Kurdish minority, invaded
Iran and Kuwait and fought two disastrous wars with the United States -- stepped off Iraq's political stage for good.

National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said in a series of broadcast interviews that the late strongman's final minutes were lived in the same spirit as his grandstanding appearances in an Iraqi court.

"One thing I can't explain, I have never seen any repentance, never seen any remorse there," Rubaie told CNN.

Rubaie said officials and executioners had danced around the body afterwards. "This is a natural reaction. These people have lost loved ones."

Sami al-Askari, a Shiite lawmaker close to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki who also saw the hanging, said it had taken place in an old Saddam-era military intelligence headquarters in the Kadhimiyah district of northern Baghdad.

He said the location had symbolic value, because it had been a centre of torture and execution under Saddam.

Saddam's and two co-accused -- his half brother and intelligence chief Barzan Hassan al-Tikriti and revolutionary court judge Awad Ahmed al-Bandar -- were sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on November 5.

Officials said that the execution of Saddam's aides had been postponed until after the Eid al-Adha religious holiday, which ends on Thursday.

Over several months, the Iraqi High Tribunal heard how they oversaw a campaign of collective punishment against the Shiite village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, where Saddam escaped an assassination bid in 1982.

Dujail's orchards were torn up and 148 men and boys were executed after being dragged through Bandar's kangaroo court.

More than 20 years later, Saddam was overthrown by a US-led invasion and later put on trial by a new Shiite-led government. The trio's death sentences were confirmed by a panel of appeal court judges on December 26.

The hangings then became inevitable, with Maliki's government determined to avenge Saddam's brutal 24-year reign and to strike a blow against a violent Sunni insurgency that still honours his name.

"Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself," said US
President George W. Bush.

Maliki urged Iraqis not to see the execution as an attack on one community or another.

"The door is still open for everyone whose hands are not stained with the blood of innocents to take part in the building of Iraq. New Iraq shall not be ruled by one party or sect," he declared.

But Saddam's end was vigorously denounced by Sunni Iraqis, who mourned in their hundreds in the area around his home town of Tikrit and the insurgent bastion of Samarra.

Human Rights Watch complained that Maliki's administration had pressured the judge to return guilty verdicts, and was quick to attack the execution.

"The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders. History will judge the deeply flawed Dujail trial and this execution harshly," said the watchdog's Richard Dicker.