Ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was hanged inside one of his former torture centers yesterday 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 US enemies and praising the rebels who have pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.
Iraqi Shiites, persecuted during Saddam's 24-year rule, feted his end as a dream come true, dancing and hammering off bullets while Sunni extremists slammed the deceitfulness of the US-backed government for hanging their hero.
Iraqi state TV showed a brief film of Saddam being placed in a noose by masked hangmen, cutting away just before his execution.
Hussein appeared calm, chatting to his burly, leather-jacketed executioners as they wrapped his neck first in black cloth then a thick hemp rope and steered him forward on a metal platform.
The gallows was constructed in red-painted metal and was fixed inside a dim room with blue-grey walls. The guards wore black balaclava-style hoods.
Saddam was maneuvered forward firmly but not aggressively by the guards, the grey-bearded prisoner looking thin inside a smart, 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.
National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said in interviews that the former 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 said.
"When you reach the stage when that's it, that's the end, I think you tend to be right and honest with yourself and confess something," he added.
"But he was praising the mujahidin, he was praising the jihadis ... he was cursing the Persians and he was cursing the West as well," he said.
Rubaie said officials and even executioners had danced around the body afterwards. "This is a natural reaction. These people have lost loved ones."
"The time of death was very, very close to 6am ... It went like a blink of an eye -- he died very, very quickly -- it couldn't have been quicker," he said.
And with that, Saddam stepped off Iraq's political stage for good.
Sami al-Askari, a Shiite lawmaker close to Maliki who also saw the hanging, said it had taken place in an old Saddam-era military intelligence headquarters in the Khadimiyah district of northern Baghdad.
He said the location had symbolic value, because it had been a center of torture and execution under Saddam.
Rubaie said that Saddam's US jailers had handed him over to Iraqis and that there had been no US personnel in the building as the trapdoor dropped and the dictator's life was ended in a "100 percent Iraqi operation."
Hours after the execution, a car bomb exploded in a fish market in the central Iraqi Shiite city of Kufa, killing at least 31 people, but it was not immediately clear whether the attack represented the first reprisal from his supporters.
Saddam and two co-accused -- intelligence chief Barzan Hassan al-Tikriti and revolutionary court judge Awad Ahmed al-Bandar -- were sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on Nov. 5.
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