MORE PICS – SADAM HUSSEIN Hanged; Final Defiant Moments; Refused HOOD & Shouted: “'God is Great. The nation will be Victorious & Palestine is Arab"

Update Jan 15 07..For the latest Post , GO H E R E posting On…

NO PICTURES or VIDEO Released on the HANGING of SADDAM’s Half-Brother BARZAN IBRAHIM al-Tikriti (Whose Head was decapitated (severed) by Rope) & Awad Ahmed al-Bandar; 2 Former Aides -Executed early Monday on Jan 15 07; 16 Days After Saddam Hussein.
The official Video filmed was shown to a selected group of people & reporters (AP, CNN, Reuters etc) as proof that the two were executed and the Iraqi offcial said copies would NOT be released, check it out in the above link for the details.
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= = == = = = =UPDATE: Jan 02 2006; 12:06pm with Updated New death photos & pictures lying on a gurney and shrouded in a coffin & other details)

Saddam is buried in home village, From BBC, UK
(see this link to the Execution Video taken by cell hand phone)

ABOVE: Video Statistics as at Jan 14 2007; viewed 15,097,753

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, hanged for crimes against humanity on Saturday, has been buried in the village where he was born 69 years ago.

ABOVE: His coffin drapped in the Iraqi flag was mouned by a handful of closed relatives and tribsemen (BELOW) in the early hours of Sunday morning

In a sparsely attended ceremony in Awja, in the Tikrit region north of the capital, the former Iraqi leader was laid to rest in a family plot.

ABOVE: Awja his birth town is in the outskirts of Tirikit, 130km north of Bagdad. His tomb was dug from the building (BELOW) he build in the 80's for religious ceremony and is 3km away from the place where his sons were buried

His sons Uday and Qusay, killed by US troops in 2003, are also buried there. New video of his execution posted on the internet, shows he exchanged taunts with onlookers from the gallows. Just hours after his execution, Saddam Hussein's body was reportedly flown to Awja aboard a US aircraft and handed to clan leaders for burial. "Saddam Hussein has been buried today at 0400 (0100 GMT) in a place that was constructed during his regime in the centre of Awja," said relative Musa Faraj, quoted by AFP news agency.

ABOVE & BELOW: A crowd of 2000 diehard supporters marched through the streets protesing his execution on Sunday

The BBC's John Simpson in Baghdad says the Iraqi government will not be worried that Saddam's grave may turn into a place of political pilgrimage. Ministers here think that his practical influence in Iraq has been entirely finished by his execution, our correspondent says.
'Frightened and terrified'

The former president was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on 5 November over the killings of 148 Shias from the town of Dujail in the 1980s. Saddam Hussein's execution has closed a dark chapter in Iraq's history, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said In a statement, the prime minister said: "Justice, in the name of the people, has carried out the death sentence against the criminal Saddam, who faced his fate like all tyrants, frightened and terrified during a hard day which he did not expect.

= = == = = =UPDATE: Dec 31 2006, 18:22pm
New Videos Show Graphic Saddam Images
Graphic Images of Saddam Hussein's Final Minutes Are Posted on Web Sites
Worldwide
By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA Associated Press Writer; The Associated Press
BAGHDAD, Iraq Dec 30, 2006 (AP)- The scene was at once macabre and riveting.One of the most notorious dictators of the late 20th century, his hands bound behind him, was led up the stairs of the gallows by masked men in leather coats. A few seconds later, a trapdoor snapped open and with a crash Saddam was dead. He may have been the first chief of state executed in the age of the Internet and the camera phone. Probably because of that, his death was graphically documented on video and available worldwide, within hours. By several accounts, Saddam was calm but scornful of his captors, exchanging taunts and accusations with the crowd gathered to watch him die insisting that he was Iraq's savior, not its tyrant and scourge. State television did not broadcast footage of the actual hanging. But camera phone video, posted in full or in part on several Web sites, picked up where the TV coverage left off. In the videos, Saddam calmly recited verses from the Quran in a calm, clear voice as the trap door opened.

Finally, his body can be seen swinging in the dim light his neck apparently snapped. Saddam had reportedly asked that, as Iraq's commander in chief, he be sent before a firing squad. Instead, he was condemned to die on the gallows as though he were a garden variety murderer. The 69-year-old former president struggled briefly as the U.S. military, which had custody of Saddam, handed him over to the Iraqis, said Sami al-Askari, a political adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Saddam did not wear his familiar military uniform with its jaunty beret but a black coat over a white shirt, black trousers and black shoes. His jet black hair was carefully combed, his salt-and-pepper beard neatly clipped. From that moment on, his last acts of defiance, it seems, consisted of verbal jousting and silent contempt. Saddam was taken to a former military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, in northern Baghdad. During his regime, he had numerous dissidents executed in the facility.
Munir Haddad, an appeals court judge who witnessed the hanging, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that Saddam was not sedated. "Not at all, Saddam was normal and in full control," Haddad said. "He was aware of his fate and he knew he was about to face death. He said, 'This is my end, this is the end of my life, but I started my life as a fighter and as a political militant so death does not frighten me.'" After his captors brought Saddam into the execution chamber, his hands which were tied in front of him were untied, then tied in the back, Haddad told the BBC. "He said we are going to heaven and our enemies will rot in hell and he also called for forgiveness and love among Iraqis but also stressed that the Iraqis should fight the Americans and the Persians," Haddad told the BBC. The New York Times reported that Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser for Iraq, stood next to Saddam before he mounted the scaffold, and asked him if he felt remorse and fear. "No," the Times quoted Saddam saying. "I am a militant and I have no fear for myself. I have spent my life in jihad and fighting aggression. Anyone who takes this route should not be afraid." Al-Rubaie told the Times that one of the guards grew angry. "You have destroyed us," he reportedly shouted. "You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution." "I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persian and Americans," Saddam responded, al-Rubaie told the Times. "God damn you," the guard said. "God damn you," Saddam said, according to the Times. A silent, minute-long video that aired on Iraqi television showed Saddam on the scaffold. He seemed to have little to say, and his eyes appeared lost in a 1,000-yard stare.

ABOVE: The masked hangmen wore black balaclava-style hoods and BELOW: His Final moments before the black cloth was placed around his neck (see pics further below, from an earlier video)

There've been many atrocities committed by an Iraqi
A condemned man named Sadam Hussein
When the sun rises tomorrow, Sadam Hussein... must hang...
Hang down your head, Sadam Hussein
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head, Sadam Hussein
Poor boy, you're bound to die

Adapted from THE KINGSTON TRIO lyrics - "Tom Dooley"

He said Saddam initially resisted when he was taken by Iraqi guards

Four or five burly men guided him gently but firmly toward a red metal railing marking the trap door. A thick rope hung like a sinister vine from the low ceiling. An unseen photographer's flash created fleeting stark shadows. With a blank expression, Saddam refused a black hood but he did so with a shake of his head that seemed more distracted than defiant. Then he appeared to agree to let one of his executioners tie a black scarf around his neck. The Times reported that his guards explained the rope could cut off his head, and offered to protect his neck with the scarf. In the televised video,

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and here is the MISSING footage........................the split second when the trap door was released and his hanging and dangling moments before being taken down to the metal floor at the bottom.

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.

ABOVE: Final adjustment to the noose by the hangmen and BELOW: He said his last prayers and his last defiant words.

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Saddam stood stoically as the noose was slipped over his head. The noose was tightened. Then the Iraqi TV footage ended. But the camera phone video, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera and aired in full on Arabic-language Web sites, continued. In the video, one of those attending the execution called out praise for Dawa Party founder and Shiite cleric Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, who was executed along with his sister by Saddam in 1980. The Islamic party has been locked in a fierce decades-old battle with Saddam's now outlawed secular Baath party. Muqtada al-Sadr, the powerful and radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, is a distant relative of the Dawa founder. Saddam appeared to smile at those taunting him from below the gallows, and said they were not showing their manhood. Then Saddam began reciting the "Shahada," a Muslim prayer that says there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger. "Saddam did so but with sarcasm," Haddad said. But to others, Saddam's tone sounded calm and measured, neither sarcastic nor frightened.

ABOVE: The precise moment (see the top of his head is below the metal bar, compared to the previous pic) the trap door was released and the final jerk that broke his neck and BELOW: His final hanging moments

Saddam made it to midway through his second recitation of the verse. His last word was Muhammad, according to a translation by the Associated Press. The floor dropped out of the gallows, there was a crash and the chamber erupted in shouting. "The tyrant has fallen," someone called. The video showed a close-up of Saddam's face as he swung from the rope.

ABOVE & BELOW: The few lingering hanging minutes when his neck was snapped by the impact of the rope. Death can be only instant.

ABOVE and BELOW: Without the neck support, the head can only be in a horizontal position.

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ABOVE: The body lying on the metal floor (BELOW)

= = == = == == = = extracted from Video (2 mins 36 s) available H E R E

and here are his dead sons again released by US forces then to let the people know they were "no more"
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= = == = some notes on Death, so fearful by many,

Death is greatly misunderstood as being the end of it all, of coming too soon. Death always seems to be something just out of your understanding, responsibility, control and power. This is completely inaccurate. Death is a transformation. Transformation from one way of being into another. A death is just a night to your soul.
No man or woman consciously knows for sure which day will be the last for him or her in this particular life, that each calls the present one. Mortality with its birth and death is the framework in which the soul, for now, is expressed in flesh. It seems, perhaps, easier to have no conscious idea of the year or time that death might occur. Unconsciously of course each man and woman knows, and yet hides the knowledge.
The knowledge is usually hidden for many reasons, but the fact of death, personal death, is never forgotten. It seems obvious, but the full enjoyment of life would be impossible in the framework, now, of earthly reality without the knowledge of death.
Life and death are but two faces of your eternal, ever changing existence, however feel and appreciate the joy of your own being. Many who lived into the ripe old age of eighties or their nineties appreciated the extent of the beauty of their being and are seemed to be aware of the withdrawing of life force (energy) and their impending death.
Remember life implies death, and death implies life. Death is therefore as creative as birth, as necessary for action and consciousness, in your terms. Rest assures that death is another beginning.
Whether you die today or tomorrow, you have lived before, and will again, and your new life, in your terms, springs out of the old, and is growing in the old and contained within it as the seed is already contained within the flower.
No one "dies" before his or her time. In the entire fabric of your existence, this life is a brilliant, eternally unique and precious portion, but only a portion, from which you emerge with joy and understanding whether you die tomorrow or in years to come. The choice , manner and time of death are always yours. When the soul is ready to release the body, when it has accomplished what it came here to do, it moves on.
But for the condemned Saadam Hussein, he knew his last day and the choice, but the manner was not his. He preferred as the Commander of the Iraqi army be shot by a firing squad. So he was killed by hanging. And the reality was created by him for the experience.
When you kill a man, you believe that you kill him forever. The hunter is forced to emotionally identify with its prey. So to kill is to be killed. The balance of life sustains all.
There is never any justification for violence. There is no justification for hatred. There is no justification for murder. Those who indulge in violence for whatever reason are themselves changed, and the purity of their purpose adultered.
Hate creates destruction on earth and until the lessons are learned, destruction follows destruction. In the terms of other systems, that kind of destruction does not exist - but we believe that it does, and the agonies of dying are sorely felt everywhere. It is not that we must be taught not to destroy, for destruction does not actually exist. It is that we must be trained to create responsibly.
You make and create your own reality: your dreaming reality, your waking reality, and all realities in which you have existence. There are no accidents. You are responsible for each daily moment, individually and en masse. En masse, your beliefs bring about the world conditions that you know.
We are in physical existence to learn and understand that your energy, translated into feelings, thoughts and emotions, causes all experience. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS.

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Then came another voice: "Let him swing for three minutes." Asked if Saddam suffered, Haddad told the BBC: "He was killed instantly, I witnessed the impact of the rope around his neck and it was a horrible sight." Iraqi television broadcasts included a shaky image of the aftermath: a shot of what appeared to be Saddam's corpse, laid out on a hospital gurney, his head wrenched grotesquely to the right. His neck appeared to be bruised. Saddam's half brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were originally scheduled to be hanged along with their former leader. Iraqi officials, though, decided to reserve the occasion for Saddam alone.

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The execution of Sadam Hussein was received with jubilation in some parts of Iraq but his Baathist Party has vowed "to retaliate in all ways and in all places that hurt America" His death could make reconcillation tougher between the warring factions. In death he would have been more dangerous than alive. All these hanging pictures and death photos of his execution were made available by IRAQI TV and some were recorded using cell phones. These death pictures were deliberately released to show that he is "dead and gone". The other dead photo and picture of him lying on a gurney and and shrouded in a coffin were also released to confirm he is "no more alive"

``Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he will send it to heaven with the martyrs,'' - Sadam's last words in his letter on November 05, the day he was convicted.
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He is a genius and more connected in the wrong direction. And these words are a good example of the severe misinterpretations about the nature of good. Till his last, he was unable to perceive - unenlightened and still clinged on to the belief that he can go to heaven for all his actions in this earthly life.

The Universe is of good intent; evil and destruction do not exist except as a scenario. Evidence of evil in the world appears to our senses in order to let us know the consequences of the beliefs we hold, but mankind will awaken from that sadness as from a bad dream.Any misunderstandings, crimes, and atrocities, real as they are, are seldom committed out of any intent to be evil, but because of severe misinterpretations about the nature of good, and the means that can be taken towards its actualization. Quite simply, a belief in the good without a belief in the evil may seem highly unrealistic to you. This belief, however, is the best kind of insurance that you can have, both during physical life and afterwards.

Remember life implies death, and death implies life. A death is just a night to his soul. He had lived before and will live again. The choice of life and death is always yours. In the dawn of physical existence, men knew that death was merely a change of form.
Everyone goes to the same "place" after physical death. All those who come to this realm are met and comforted. Those with strong belief systems may continue to carry over these beliefs into this realm, and they are confronted with truth - the truth being the highest vibration and truth that exists - LOVE.
When they are able to perceive and experience this unconditional love, compassion and acceptance, they are humbled. They realize that what they have done in murdering others involved huge illusions of separation demonstrated as fear, ignorance, anger, arrogance, denial and rejection of the divine
All of Sadam’s actions are what you can consider to be of the lower vibrations, a less preferred path one could choose, and the recovery from such actions can be quite difficult. When the path of least resistance and faster growth is chosen there is less baggage to eliminate and clear understanding is easier to grasp.
Those who were killed by him should also receive great healing and counseling and also have the opportunity to understand themselves, their own fears, and the terrorist's feelings. Those who commit these acts of terror will receive healing and counseling, and then face their own terror with the opportunity to feel what they have done to others, until it dawns on them that all life is divine, all from the same Source - there are no favorites. . When these terrorists genuinely apologize for their actions to those who were their targets, they are on their path of real healing. The terrorists will understand how they chose to be in separation from themselves, and others.
If their apologies are acknowledged and accepted, the healing is even more rapid and complete. However it is not mandatory or always possible for the apologies and acceptance of such apologies to occur at the same time. Eventually, a more complete healing all the way around will occur when all involved souls reach a certain point in their growth.
What is important is that each soul understands its choices and actions, and the consequences of their actions. However when the moment of enlightenment occurs, it will be a time of great celebration - a celebration of real truth with love

= = = = =Background on his arrest

ABOVE: The hole entrance where Sadam Hussein was found hiding when he was caught "like a rat". His first words: "I am the President of Iraq... I want to negotiate" & BELOW: The sparse necessity found there to survive.


ABOVE: As he was when he was caught & BELOW: The strain on him after he was caught



= = = == =this was an earlier report when the 2nd Video was NOT yet released..from............

Baghdad, Dec. 30 (AP): Saddam Hussein, among the world's most brutal dictators,. struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners But as his final moments approached, he grew calm. Dressed in a black coat and trousers, 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. After a quarter-century of remorseless brutality that killed countless thousands and led Iraq into disastrous wars against the United States and Iran, Saddam was executed before sunrise Saturday. Within hours of his death, at least 46 people died and more than 80 were wounded in two bombings _ 31 in one attack south of the capital and 15 in a Baghdad blast. A man whose testimony led to Saddam's conviction and execution 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. Iraqi television showed what it said was the body of Saddam Hussein after his execution Saturday. 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.

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. 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 (130 kilometers) 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 Saddam Big Mosque.

Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit (ABOVE) 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. More than 2,000 people, many carrying weapons, demonstrated in Adwar, a village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in an underground bunker. It is also the hometown of Saddam's former No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim, who is still at large. 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 Iraqiya TV. Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, provided The Associated Press with some details of his handover to Iraqi authorities and his execution.

ABOVE: The masked hangmen wore black balaclava-style hoods and BELOW: His Final moments before the black cloth was placed around his neck

He said 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.

ABOVE; The black cloth was placed to cushion the impact of the rope otherwise the head would be severed and BELOW: The final adjustment

His hat was removed shortly before the noose was slipped around his neck. His hands were also tied before he was walked up to the scaffold. 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.

The noose was put in position; and once the stand was released; most probably his neck would have been severed; Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said " It went like a blink of an eye -- he died very, very quickly -- it couldn't have been quicker."

``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.

ABOVE & BELOW: The metal framwork in which th etrap door was place

Saddam appears calm as he stands on the metal framework of the gallows (ABOVE) . 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. ``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,'' Al-Rubaie said. He added that he did not know who Bander was.[ Note added: Awad Hamed al-Bandar is the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, also condemned to hang]

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 written on Nov. 5, the day he was convicted, 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 in the letter, posted Wednesday. Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam's legal team, said the United States maintained physical custody of Saddam until his execution to prevent him being humiliated publicly. 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.

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BAGHDAD (AFP) - Ousted Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein has been hanged inside one of his former torture centres 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 American 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 Saturday. Iraqi state television showed a brief film of Saddam being placed in a noose by masked hangmen, cutting away just before his execution.The ousted despot 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 manoeuvred 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 a series of broadcast 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 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) ...

ABOVE and BELOW: The death photos and pictures were deliberately released to show to the people he is "dead and gone"

It went like a blink of an eye -- he died very, very quickly -- it couldn't have been quicker." And with that Saddam -- the burly sadist who slaughtered Iraq's Kurdish minority, invaded Iran and Kuwait and fought two disastrous wars with the United States -- 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 centre of torture and execution under Saddam. 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 percent Iraqi operation".

ABOVE " A cartoon depicts that the execution was "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.

ABOVE & BELOW: The car bombs immediately after his execution was announced in which more than 60 people were killed

Saddam's 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 November 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 December 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. "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 W. 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 Dicke

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Altantuya Shaariibuu is a MONGOLIAN professional translator & interpreter Came to MALAYSIA (Looked up LOVER Abdul Razak Baginda for payment of services rendered); ABDUCTED, SHOT TWICE; BODY Blown UP with c4 explosives; ARRESTED- High Profile Malaysian POLITICAL ANALYST Abdul Razak Baginda (charge with abetment) Together with (1 CHIEF Inspector; and Constable- charged with murder). MORE Pictures, Details of, Lover, CRIME Scene & Updates Daily Since Nov 7th 06 till now from H E R E