Saddam Hussein executed
Deposed Iraqi dictator hanged for deaths of 148 Shiites in 1982
NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 3:01 a.m. ET Dec. 30, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Clutching a Quran and refusing a hood, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows before sunrise Saturday, executed by vengeful countrymen after a quarter-century of remorseless brutality that killed countless thousands and led Iraq into disastrous wars against the United States and Iran.
The death penalty was carried out following the guilty verdict in SaddamÂ’s trial for the killing of 148 Shiite men and boys from the town of Dujail after militants tried to assassinate him there in 1982, during IraqÂ’s war with Shiite Iran.
Witnesses to the execution told Richard Engel of NBC News that they were cheering around the body of Saddam after the hanging — three years after the deposed president was hauled from a hole in the ground by pursuing U.S. forces.
Asked if Saddam were dead, the official in the Iraqi prime minister’s office said, “Yes, the body of Saddam Hussein is in front of me.”
“Criminal Saddam was hanged to death,” state-run Iraqiya television said. The station played patriotic music and showed images of national monuments and other landmarks.
In BaghdadÂ’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.
NBC could hear cheers and celebrations in the background while talking to an official in the prime ministerÂ’s office.
“This son of a bitch is lying under my feet. … I can’t talk now because of all the cheers!” a witness said.
Three Iraqi officials who attended the execution said only he was executed on Saturday, and that his half-brother and another former regime official would hang after the weekend Islamic religious holiday. The holiday ends Tuesday for Sunnis and Wednesday for Shiites.
National security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run Iraqiya TV that only Saddam was executed Saturday. “We wanted him to be executed on a special day,” he said.
Munir Haddad, a judge on the appeals court that upheld SaddamÂ’s death sentence, and Sami al-Askari, political adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, also told The AP that only Saddam was executed. Iraqi state TV originally had reported that all three men had been executed, Saddam followed by the other two.
SaddamÂ’s final words
He said Saddam was clad completely in black, with a jacket, trousers, hat and shoes, rather than prison garb.
Shortly before the execution, SaddamÂ’s hat was removed and Saddam was asked if he wanted to say something, al-Askari said.
“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.”’
Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence headquarters in BaghdadÂ’s Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said. The neighborhood is home to the Iraqi capitalÂ’s most important Shiite shine, the Imam Kazim shrine.
Al-Askari said the government had not decided what to do with SaddamÂ’s body.
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.”
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.”
Al-Rubaie said that the other two men “will be executed after the Eid.”
Eid al-Adha, Islam's most important religious festival, began at dawn Saturday for Sunnis and will start Sunday for Iraqi Shiites.
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.
‘A new page of history’
Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he heard the news.
“Now all the victims’ families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence,” said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.
“We are looking for a new page of history despite the tragedy of the past,” said Saif Ibrahim, a 26-year-old Baghdad resident.
But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death.
“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 the Saddam Big Mosque.
As a security precaution, police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days.
Bush: ‘Executed after receiving a fair trial’
“Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial — the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime,” President Bush said in a written statement released after the execution by the White House.
“Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq,” Bush continued, “but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror.”
Mariam al-Rayes, a legal expert and former member of 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." She did not attend.
The official witnesses to the execution gathered Friday in BaghdadÂ’s fortified Green Zone in final preparation for the hanging, as state television broadcast footage of his regimeÂ’s atrocities.
The Pentagon said U.S. forces, always on high alert in Iraq, were braced for any upsurge in violence from Sunni insurgents loyal to Saddam.
A U.S. judge refused late Friday to stop the execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge by the former Iraqi president.
"Petitioner Hussein's application for immediate, temporary stay of execution is denied," U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in Washington after a hearing over the telephone with attorneys.
An Iraqi appeals court upheld SaddamÂ’s death sentence Tuesday for the killing of 148 people who were detained and tortured after the attempt on his life.
Prime Minister al-Maliki said in statements released Friday that those who opposed the execution of Saddam were insulting the honor of his victims. His office said he made the remarks in a meeting with families of people who died during SaddamÂ’s rule.
“Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him,” al-Maliki said.
‘God’s gift to Iraqis’
In his Friday sermon, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of Najaf 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, known as SCIRI.
Rumors and reports swirled Friday over when the execution would take place and whether U.S. forces had handed Saddam over to Iraqi custody, presumably the last step before the execution.
Earlier reports said al-Maliki feared fueling religious tensions if Saddam were executed during Eid.
An execution during Eid carries great symbolism. The feast marks the sacrifice the prophet Abraham was prepared to make when God ordered him to kill his son, and many Shiites could regard SaddamÂ’s death as a gift from God. Such symbolism could further anger Sunnis, who are resentful of new Shiite power.
Najeeb al-Nueimi, a member of SaddamÂ’s legal team, said U.S. authorities were maintaining physical custody of Saddam until the time of the execution to prevent him from being humiliated beforehand. He said the Americans also want to prevent the mutilation of his corpse, as has happened to other deposed Iraqi leaders.
Saddam has been held at a U.S. base near Baghdad airport, but the place of execution was kept secret.
Meeting with half-brothers
Saddam, who said in court he had no fear of dying, had a farewell meeting with two of his half-brothers on Thursday, his lawyers said, adding the fallen dictator was in high spirits and ready to die a “martyr.”
SaddamÂ’s conviction was hailed by Bush as a triumph for the democracy he promised to foster in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
International human rights groups criticized the year-long trial, during which three defense lawyers were killed and a chief judge resigned complaining of political interference.
Rights groups, along with the United Nations and many of the United StatesÂ’ Western allies, oppose capital punishment and have voiced unease over the decision to put Saddam to death.
Saddam's lawyers issued a statement Friday calling on “everybody to do everything to stop this unfair execution.” The statement also said the former president had been transferred from U.S. custody, though American and Iraqi officials later denied that.
The governments of Yemen and Libya made eleventh-hour appeals that Saddam's life be spared.
Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul-Kader Bajammal wrote to the U.S. and Iraqi presidents, warning in his letter to President Bush that Saddam's execution would “increase the sectarian violence” in Iraq, according to the official Yemeni news agency Saba.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi made an indirect appeal to save Saddam, telling Al-Jazeera television that his trial was illegal and that he should be retried by an international court.
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