Saddam Hussein executed

30 December 2006 06:26

The former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has on Saturday been executed by hanging, at an unspecified location in Baghdad.United States-backed Iraqi television station al-Hurra and Saudi-owned satellite channel al-Arabiya said that the former Iraqi president was executed at 6am local time, following his conviction by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity."Criminal Saddam was hanged to death," state-run Iraqiya television said in an announcement.

The station played patriotic music and showed images of national monuments and other landmarks.Speaking on condition of anonymity, a US official confirmed that the execution had taken place.The British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said that the former dictator had now been held to account. "I welcome the fact that Saddam Hussein has been tried by an Iraqi court for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people," she said in a statement.Al-Arabiya has also reported that Saddam Hussein's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bander -- both of whom were also sentenced to death at the close of the same trial -- have also been executed by hanging.

Saddam's execution, which became imminent after his appeal was this week rejected, has brought to an end the life of one of the Middle East's most brutal dictators.Launching the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, campaigns against the Kurds and putting down the southern Shia revolt that followed the 1991 Gulf war -- triggered by his invasion of Kuwait -- put the casualties attributable to his rule into the hundreds of thousands.

But his conviction was for a relatively lower figure -- the deaths of 148 men and boys from the Shia Muslim town of Dujail, where members of an opposition group had made a botched attempt to assassinate him in 1982.

Many critics dismissed the trial as a form of victors' justice and Saddam Hussein's defence had accused the Iraqi government of interfering in the proceedings. The latter complaint was backed by the US-based Human Rights Watch.Ongoing was a trial for the deaths of thousands in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, who were also the victims of one of Saddam's most notorious abuses -- the gassing of 5 000 people in Halabja. If Saddam had not been executed, he could have faced as many as 12 trials for crimes against humanity.