Shiite executioners sent him to the gallows with a final mocking taunt, chanting the name of one of his most bitter opponents.
BAGHDAD: Saddam Hussein was sent to the gallows with a final mocking taunt - Shiite witnesses chanted the name of one of his most bitter opponents while the noose was readied.
In video footage of the execution, apparently captured on a mobile phone and spreading across the Internet on Sunday, members of the party carrying out the hanging can be heard chanting "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!"
The reference is to Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric whose father Mohammed Bakr Sadr and whose uncle were murdered by Saddam's agents, and who has risen to prominence since Saddam's fall as a politician and militia leader.
One of the execution party calls: "Long live Mohammed Bakr Sadr!"
"Go to hell," Saddam seems to respond, although the sound is not clear.
Saddam appears angry but remains composed in his final minutes, standing on a dusty steel platform in a dark hall in a north Baghdad military base, his hands bound and a rough hemp rope round his neck.
As the Sunni leader drops through the metal trapdoor his final prayer, the "shahada" or last testimony is caught short: "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet. There is no God but God and Mohammed..."
Noise erupts in the room as the filmmaker struggles to get a shot of Saddam's face, hanging lifeless to one side. "The tyrant has fallen, damn him!"
Saddam was executed by the Iraqi government at dawn on Saturday in a former military intelligence building in the Khadimiyah district of Baghdad where once his own victims were tortured and killed. He was buried on Sunday in his home village.
The 69-year-old strongman had been convicted of crimes against humanity in the case of the village of Dujail, a Shiite community north of Baghdad where in 1982 the then dictator survived an assassination attempt.
The Sunni-led regime reacted by subjecting Dujail to collective punishment, tearing up its orchards, rounding up 148 men and boys and executing them.
Saddam fell in March 2003, when a US-led invasion force took Baghdad, and he was arrested by American commandos after nine months on the run. He was tried by a new Shiite-led government and convicted on November 5 after a year-long series of rowdy hearings, marked by boycotts from his lawyers and by political grandstanding from the defendants.
Since Saddam's fall, Mohammed Bakr Sadr's son, Moqtada, has become a figurehead for the impoverished Shiite masses who suffered under the ousted Sunni regime. He leads a powerful militia, the Mahdi Army.
That some Sadr supporters, described by the Pentagon as the most dangerous faction in Iraq's current sectarian war, were present at Saddam's death seems likely to increase tension in the country after the execution.
Iraqi state television showed a different video of the execution in which the exchange was not audible, and which cut away before the trapdoor opened.
But on Sunday, the bootleg version including the bitter final verbal exchange was spreading across Internet file-sharing sites, popping up on satellite channels and being sold hand-to-hand in Baghdad's Shiite bastion of Sadr City.
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}