Saddam Hussein hanged on holy day of sacrifice

BAGHDAD, Saturday (Agencies) - Iraq hanged ousted President Saddam Hussein at one of his own former torture centres today, the Muslim festival of Eid-ul Adha, provoking insurgents to avenge his fall with a series of vicious bomb attacks that left 70 dead.
In the hours after Saddam's dawn execution, car bombs exploded in several crowded Shiite areas of Baghdad and the town of Kufa, spreading bloody mayhem amid the celebrations, security and medical sources said.

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 telecast 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.

Shortly afterwards, a car bomb exploded in a crowded fish market in the Shiite town of Kufa, killing at least 31 people, as post-Saddam Iraq continued its headlong plunge into the abyss of civil strife.
Similar attacks in Shiite areas of Baghdad, including a triple car bombing that ripped apart a shopping street, left 39 more dead.
Iraqi Shiites, persecuted during Saddam's 24-year rule, feted his demise, dancing and cracking off bursts of automatic fire, while Sunni militants slammed the US-backed government for hanging their hero.
In the video, the ousted president 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 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 mujahideen and expected death any moment,'” the judge recounted.“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 – accused of slaughtering Iraq's Kurdish minority, invading Iran and Kuwait and fighting 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 north Baghdad.He said the location had symbolic value, because it had been a centre of torture and execution under Saddam.

Saddam 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 Shiite civilians from 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 Arabs, who mourned in their hundreds in the area around his hometown of Tikrit and the insurgent bastion of Samarra.

''The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior,'' said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at Saddam Big Mosque.

Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, provided The Associated Press with some details of his handover to Iraqi authorities and his execution. He said Saddam initially resisted when he was taken by Iraqi guards but was composed in his final moments. Shortly before the execution, Saddam was asked if he wanted to say something.

''No I don't want to,'' al-Askari, who was present at the execution, quoted Saddam as saying. Saddam repeated a prayer after a Sunni Muslim cleric who was present.

''Saddam later was taken to the gallows and refused to have his head covered with a hood,'' al-Askari said. ''Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted: 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab.'''

Meanwhile, US combat deaths were mounting. The announcement of six more fatalities brought the month's toll to 107, the highest since November 2004, which was famously marked by the battle of Fallujah.