BAGHDAD (AFX) - Ousted Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein was hanged inside one of his former torture centres today.
Officials who witnessed the execution said the 69-year-old remained defiant to the last, railing against his Iranian and American enemies and praising the rebels who have pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.
'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 a series of broadcast interviews that Saddam'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,' Al-Rubaie told CNN.
'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 mujahideen, 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 6.00am (0300 GMT) ... It went like a blink of an eye -- he died very, very quickly -- it couldn't have been quicker.'
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 centre of torture and execution under Saddam.
'The execution took place in a building of the fifth section of the former General Intellegence Directorate in Kadhimiyah,' he said, a venue chosen because so many of Saddam's now victorious enemies had died there.
Al-Rubaie said the Saddam's American 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 pct Iraqi operation'.
Saddam and two co-accused -- his half brother and 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.
Officials said that the execution of Saddam's aides had been postponed until after the Eid al-Adha religious holiday, which ends on Thursday.
Over several months, the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad heard how they oversaw a campaign of collective punishment against the Shiite village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, where Saddam escaped an assassination bid in 1982.
Dujail's orchards were torn up and 148 men and boys were executed after being dragged through Bandar's kangaroo court.
More than 20 years later, Saddam was overthrown by a US-led invasion and later put on trial by a new Shiite-led government. The trio's death sentences were confirmed by a panel of appeal court judges on Dec 26.
The hangings then became inevitable, with Maliki's government determined to avenge Saddam's brutal 24-year reign and to strike a blow against a violent Sunni insurgency that still honours his name.
Saddam's Jordan-based defence team, which largely boycotted the year-long trial, made one last desperate shake of the dice by going to court in the US to demand that the ousted despot remain in US military custody.
But US authorities in Baghdad insisted that the detainees have been under Iraqi legal authority for more than a year and were only being held in an American military base as a simple security precaution.
'Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself,' said US president George Bush.
Saddam's trial was the subject of fierce criticism from Sunni Iraqis -- who accused the court of being a puppet of Iraq's US occupiers and the Maliki government's Iranian allies -- and from international rights groups.
Human Rights Watch complained that Maliki's government had pressured the judge to return guilty verdicts, and was quick to attack the execution.
'The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders. History will judge the deeply flawed Dujail trial and this execution harshly,'said the watchdog's Richard Dicker.
But the hanging will be broadly welcomed among Iraq's majority Shiite population, which held noisy street parties to celebrate Saddam's arrest in December 2003 and conviction this year.
In the Shiite holy city of Najaf celebratory gunfire erupted around the city in the immediate aftermath of the verdict.
Security officials fear a backlash, however, from hardline factions among Iraq's Sunni minority, including the Islamist and nationalist militant groups that make up the deadliest elements of Iraq's violent insurgency. newsdesk@afxnews.com afp/cw COPYRIGHT Copyright AFX News Limited 2006. All rights reserved. The copying, republication or redistribution of AFX News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of AFX News. AFX News and AFX Financial News Logo are registered trademarks of AFX News Limited