Just as the muezzin was calling out for this mornings prayer in Baghdad, the once so mighty Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was lead to the gallows and hanged for his crimes committed against his own people.

According to BBC News the former dictator was brought in carrying a copy of the Koran while the sentence was read out to him.

Iraqi TV said the execution took place just before 0600 local time (0300GMT). A representative of the prime minister and a Sunni Muslim cleric were present.

Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie, who witnessed the execution, told the BBC that the former leader went to the gallows quietly:

"We took him to the gallows and he was saying some few slogans. He was very, very, very, broken."

Just a small group of Iraqi dignitaries witnessed the execution inside a building at an Iraqi compound known by the Americans as Camp Justice, a secure facility in the northern Baghdad suburb of Khadimeya.


Saddam Hussein was not the only individual from the former regime that got the death sentence. His half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti, the former head of Saddams notorious intelligence and security service, Mukhabarat, and the former head of Saddams Revolutionary Court Awad Hamed al-Bandar, both got the the death sentence, but are believed to be executed sometime after the Eid festival ends next week (not to be confused with the Eid festival ending the month of Ramadan).

During the tribunal proceedings a defiant Saddam Hussein rejected accusations of war crimes and genocide, branding President George W Bush as the "real criminal", denouncing the proceedings as "theater" and questioning the validity of the law he was to be tried under.

The US President George W Bush hailed the execution as an important milestone on the road to building an Iraqi democracy and continued by saying;

"It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial.

"It 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."

The execution of Saddam Hussein marked the ending of an authoritarian regime that ruled Iraq for more than 30 years, starting in 1968, with Saddam as its leader since 1979.