Saddam Hussein dies on gallows, exiting Iraq’s stage after long, brutal reign

[Jubok]

 

This video image released by Iraqi state television shows Saddam Hussein's guards wearing ski masks and preparing to place a noose around the deposed leader's neck moments before his execution Saturday Dec. 30. 2006. Clutching a Quran and refusing a hood, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows before sunrise Saturday.

Photograph by : AP Photo/IRAQI TV, HO

Christopher Torchia and Qassim Abdul-ZahraAssociated Press

BAGHDAD (AP) — Saddam Hussein struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners. But as his final moments approached and masked executioners slipped a black cloth and noose around his neck, he grew calm.

In a final moment of defiance, he refused a hood to cover his eyes.
New video, first broadcast by Al-Jazeera satellite television early Sunday, had sound of someone in the group invited to watch the execution praising the founder of the Shiite Muslim Dawa party, who was executed in 1980 along with his sister by Saddam.

Saddam appeared to smile at those taunting him from below the gallows. He said they were not showing manhood.

Then Saddam began reciting the Shahada, a Muslim prayer that says there is no god but God and Muhammed is his prophet, on an unabridged copy of the same tape, apparently shot with a camera phone and posted on a website.
Saddam made it midway through his second recitation of the verse. His last word was Muhammed.

The floor dropped out of the gallows.

“The tyrant has fallen,” someone in the group of onlookers shouted.
The video showed a close-up of Saddam’s face as he swung from the rope.
Then came another voice: “Let him swing for three minutes.”

Earlier, Iraqi state television showed grainy video of what it said was Saddam’s body, the head uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.
A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam’s conviction and execution before sunrise said he was shown the body because “everybody wanted to make sure that he was really executed.”

“Now, he is in the garbage of history,” said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town Dujail.

The post-execution footage showed the man identified as Saddam lying on a stretcher, covered in a white shroud. His neck and part of the shroud have what appear to be bloodstains. His eyes are closed.

In Baghdad’s Shiite enclave Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. 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.

The execution took place during the year’s deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll reaching 108.

U.S. President George W. Bush said in a statement issued from his ranch in Texas that bringing Saddam to justice “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.”

He said that the execution marks the “end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops” and cautioned that Saddam’s death will not halt the violence in Iraq.

Within hours of his death, at least 56 people died and scores wounded in three bombings: two nearly simultaneous explosions in one Baghdad neighbourhood, and one south of the capital.

Ali Hamza, 30, a university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he learned of Saddam’s death.

“Now all the victims’ families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence,” said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 130 kilometres south of Baghdad.

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.

Arab satellite television channels said Saddam’s body had been be returned to Tikrit for Sunday burial next to his sons Odai and Qusai in the main cemetery in the nearby town Ouja, where Saddam was born. The sons and a grandson were killed in a gunbattle with Americans in Mosul in July 2003.

Iraq’s Al-Iraqiya television later confirmed the body had been handed to the Salahuddin province governor and the leader of Saddam’s Albu-Nassir clan.
Um Abdullah, a Sunni and teacher in Tikrit, said she would wear black to mourn the city’s favourite son.

“Saddam will be a hero in our eyes,” she said.

“I have five kids and I will teach them to take revenge on Americans.”
Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took into the streets, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air and calling for vengeance.

Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 went into the streets to protest the execution.

Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets of Tikrit, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air, and calling for vengeance.

Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 people took to the streets protesting the execution of Saddam.

A couple hundred people also protested the execution just outside the Anbar capital of Ramadi, and more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Adwar, the village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in an underground bunker.

In a statement, Saddam’s lawyers said that in the aftermath of his death, “the world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and maintained his principles.”

“He did not lie when he declared his trial null,” they said.

Saddam’s half brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were not hanged along with their former leader as originally planned. Officials wanted to reserve the occasion for Saddam alone.

“We wanted him to be executed on a special day,” National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run al-Iraqiya television.

Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, told The Associated Press that Saddam initially resisted when he was taken by Iraqi guards but was composed in his final moments.

He said Saddam was clad in a black suit, hat and shoes, rather than prison garb. His hat was removed and his hands tied shortly before the noose was slipped around his neck.

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.’<\!f>”

Iraqi state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose around Saddam’s neck. Saddam appeared calm as he stood on the metal framework of the gallows. The footage cuts off just before the execution.
Al-Askari said the government had not decided what to do with Saddam’s body.

The Iraqi prime minister’s office released a statement that said Saddam’s execution was a “strong lesson” to ruthless leaders who commit crimes against their own people.

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 Dujail. 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.

U.S. troops cheered as news of Saddam’s execution appeared on television at the mess hall at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad. But some soldiers expressed doubt that Saddam’s death would be a significant turning point for Iraq.

“First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial,” said Specialist Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in Iraq. “So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?”

At his death, Saddam 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.