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Saddam Hussein executed for war crimes
By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA,
Associated Press Writers
Saturday, December 30, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein struggled briefly
after American military guards handed him over
to Iraqi executioners. But as his final moments
approached, he grew calm. He clutched a Quran as
he was led to the gallows, and in one final
moment of defiance, refused to have a hood
pulled over his head before facing the same fate
he was accused of inflicting on countless
thousands during a quarter-century of ruthless
power.
A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam's
conviction and execution before sunrise Saturday
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 of
Dujail.
In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City,
hundreds of people danced in the streets while
others fired guns in the air to celebrate his
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.
The execution took place during the year's
deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll
reaching 108.
President 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 Saddam's execution, a bomb
planted aboard a minibus exploded in a fish
market south of Baghdad, killing 17 people, said
Haidr Nahi, service director of the al-Furat
al-Awssat Hospital. Some 26 others were wounded
in the explosion in Kufa, a Shiite town 100
miles south of the Iraqi capital.
Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old 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 80
miles 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.
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 street of Tikrit in spite
of the curfew carrying pictures of Saddam and
shooting into the air and calling for vengeance
on Saddam's execution.
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, many carrying pictures of Saddam.
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 shortly before the noose was slipped
around his neck.
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.'"
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.
Saddam was executed at a former military
intelligence headquarters in Baghdad's Shiite
neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said.
During his regime, Saddam had numerous
dissidents executed in the facility, located in
a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi
capital's most important Shiite shine — the Imam
Kazim shrine.
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.
"We strongly reject considering Saddam as a
representative of any sect in Iraq because the
tyrant only represented his evil soul," the
statement said. "The door is still open for
those whose hands are not tainted with the blood
of innocent people to take part in the political
process and work on rebuilding Iraq."
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 Spc. 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?"
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."
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.
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.
When the U.S. invaded in 2003, Iraqis had been
transformed from among the region's most
prosperous people to some of its most
impoverished.
___
Associated Press Writer Will Weissert
contributed to this report.
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