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(AP) Saddam Hussein, the shotgun-waving dictator
who ruled Iraq with a remorseless brutality for a quarter-century
and was driven from power by a U.S.-led war that left his country
in shambles, was taken to the gallows clutching a Quran and hanged
Saturday.
    

  In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, people danced in the
streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate the former
dictator's death. The government did not impose a round-the-clock
curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any
surge in retaliatory violence.

      It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three
U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the
new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn
insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.

      President Bush called Saddam's execution "the kind of justice
he denied the victims of his brutal regime."

      State-run Iraqiya television news reported that Saddam's
half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former
chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, also were hanged.
However, three officials said only Saddam was executed.

      "We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National
Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run Iraqiyah.

      Al-Rubaie said Saddam "totally surrendered" and did not
resist. He said a judge read the sentence to Saddam, who was taken
in handcuffs to the execution room. When he stood in the execution
room, photographs and video footage were taken, al-Rubaie said.

      "He did not ask for anything. He was carrying a Quran and said:
'I want this Quran to be given to this person,' a man he called
Bander," he said. Al-Rubaie said he did not know who Bander was.

      "Saddam was treated with respect when he was alive and after
his death," al-Rubaie said. "Saddam's execution was 100 percent
Iraqi and the American side did not interfere."

      Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki, said: "Saddam was taken by force to the gallows but he
was composed when taken to execution."

      He said the government had not decided what to do with Saddam's
body.

      Mariam al-Rayes, a legal expert and a former member of the
Shiite bloc in parliament, told Iraqiya television that the
execution "was filmed and God willing it will be shown. There was
one camera present, and a doctor was also present there."

      Al-Rayes, an al-Maliki ally, did not attend the execution. She
said Al-Maliki did not attend but was represented by an aide.

      The station earlier was airing national songs after the first
announcement and had a tag on the screen that read "Saddam's
execution marks the end of a dark period of Iraq's history."

      The execution was carried out around the start of Eid al-Adha,
the Islamic world's largest holiday, which marks the end of the
Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj. Many Muslims celebrate by
sacrificing domestic animals, usually sheep.

      Sunnis and Shiites throughout the world began observing the
four-day holiday at dawn Saturday, but Iraq's Shiite community -
the country's majority - was due to start celebrating on Sunday.

      The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and
sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite
Muslims from a town where assassins tried to kill the dictator in
1982. Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal Monday and
ordered him executed within 30 days.

      A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution,
rejecting a last-minute court challenge.

      Al-Maliki had rejected calls that Saddam be spared, telling
families of people killed during the dictator's rule that would be
an insult to the victims.

      "Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him, and
there will be no review or delay in carrying out the sentence,"
al-Maliki's office quoted him as saying during a meeting with
relatives before the hanging.

      Human Rights Watch criticized the execution, calling Saddam's
trial "deeply flawed."

      "Saddam Hussein was responsible for massive human rights
violations, but that can't justify giving him the death penalty,
which is a cruel and inhuman punishment," said Richard Dicker,
director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program.

      The hanging of Saddam, who was ruthless in ordering executions
of his opponents, will keep other Iraqis from pursuing justice
against the ousted leader.

      At his death, he was in the midst of a second trial, charged
with genocide and other crimes for a 1987-88 military crackdown
that killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Experts
said the trial of his co-defendants was likely to continue despite
his execution.

      Many people in Iraq's Shiite majority were eager to see the
execution of a man whose Sunni Arab-dominated regime oppressed them
and Kurds.

      Before the hanging, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of
Najaf on Friday called Saddam's execution "God's gift to Iraqis."

      "Oh, God, you know what Saddam has done! He killed millions of
Iraqis in prisons, in wars with neighboring countries and he is
responsible for mass graves. Oh God, we ask you to take revenge on
Saddam," said Sheik Sadralddin al-Qubanji, a member of the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

      On Thursday, two half brothers visited Saddam in his cell, a
member of the former dictator's defense team, Badee Izzat Aref,
told The Associated Press by telephone from the United Arab
Emirates. He said the former dictator handed them his personal
belongings.

      A senior official at the Iraqi defense ministry said Saddam gave
his will to one of his half brothers. The official spoke on
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to
the media.

      In a farewell message to Iraqis posted Wednesday on the
Internet, Saddam said he was giving his life for his country as
part of the struggle against the U.S. "Here, I offer my soul to
God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he will send it to heaven with
the martyrs," he said.

      One of Saddam's lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said the letter was
written by Saddam on Nov. 5, the day he was convicted by an Iraqi
tribunal in the Dujail killings.

      The message called on Iraqis to put aside the sectarian hatred
that has bloodied their nation for a year and voiced support for
the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency against U.S.-led forces,
saying: "Long live jihad and the mujahedeen."

      Saddam urged Iraqis to rely on God's help in fighting "against
the unjust nations" that ousted his regime.

      Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam's legal team, said U.S.
authorities maintained physical custody of Saddam until the
execution to prevent him being humiliated publicly or his corpse
being mutilated, as has happened to previous Iraqi leaders deposed
by force. He said they didn't want anything to happen to further
inflame Sunni Arabs.

      "This is the end of an era in Iraq," al-Nauimi said from Doha,
Qatar. "The Baath regime ruled for 35 years. Saddam was vice
president or president of Iraq during those years. For Iraqis, he
will be very well remembered. Like a martyr, he died for the sake
of his country."

      Iraq's death penalty was suspended by the U.S. military after it
toppled Saddam in 2003, but the new Iraqi government reinstated it
two years later, saying executions would deter criminals.

      Saddam's own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings
as a tool of political repression, both to eliminate real or
suspected political opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.

      In the months after he seized power on July 16, 1979, he had
hundreds of members of his own party and army officers slain. In
1996, he ordered the slaying of two sons-in-law who had defected to
Jordan but returned to Baghdad after receiving guarantees of
safety.

      Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world's most modern
societies, but then plunged the country into an eight-year war with
neighboring Iran that killed hundreds of thousands of people on
both sides and wrecked Iraq's economy.

      During that war, as part of the wider campaign against Kurds,
the Iraqi military used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town
of Halabja in northern Iraq, killing an estimated 5,000 civilians.

      The economic troubles from the Iran war led Saddam to invade
Kuwait in the summer of 1990, seeking to grab its oil wealth, but a
U.S.-led coalition inflicted a stinging defeat on the Iraq army and
freed the Kuwaitis.

      U.N. sanctions imposed over the Kuwait invasion remained in
place when Saddam failed to cooperate fully in international
efforts to ensure his programs for creating weapons of mass
destruction had been dismantled. Iraqis, once among the region's
most prosperous, were impoverished.

      The final blow came when U.S.-led troops invaded in March 2003.
Saddam's regime fell quickly, but political, sectarian and criminal
violence have created chaos that has undermined efforts to rebuild
Iraq's ruined economy.

      While he wielded a heavy hand to maintain control, Saddam also
sought to win public support with a personality cult that pervaded
Iraqi society. Thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals
were erected in his honor all over Iraq. His face could be seen on
the sides of office buildings, schools, airports and shops and on
Iraq's currency.
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Gallery

In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, people danced in the
streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate the former
dictator's death.

Saddam Hussein executed

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