Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn today for crimes against humanity after Iraq's prime minister rushed through an execution that delighted victims of the former president's harsh rule.
State television showed the 69-year-old fallen strongman looking composed and talking with the masked hangman who placed the noose around his neck on a gallows once used by his own feared secret police at a military base in northern Baghdad.
Saddam, toppled by the US invasion four years ago, had refused a hood and the presence of a cleric but did intone the Muslim profession of faith -- "There is no God but God and Mohammad is his prophet" -- when asked to do so.
"It was very quick. He died right away," one witness said, adding that the body was left to hang for 10 minutes and the death was recorded at 6:10 am.
"We heard his neck snap," said Sami al-Askari, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The prime minister himself, who fled Iraq as a young man in fear of his life from Saddam's agents, was not present.
A channel run by Maliki's party aired grainy film of the body in a white shroud with a bloody graze on the left cheek.
Askari said the government would probably reject requests for the body from Saddam's exiled daughter and tribal leaders in Tikrit. Instead he would probably be buried secretly in Iraq.
Three decades after Saddam established his personal rule by force, the execution closed a chapter in Iraq's history marked by a war with Iran and the invasion of Kuwait that turned him from ally to enemy of the United States and left the oil-rich Arab state destitute.
But Maliki, his fragile authority among fellow Shias enhanced after he forced through Saddam's killing, reached out to Saddam's Sunni followers.
"Saddam's execution puts an end to all the pathetic gambles on a return to dictatorship," he said in a statement as state television showed him signing the death warrant in red ink.
"I urge ... followers of the ousted regime to reconsider their stance as the door is still open to anyone who has no innocent blood on his hands to help in rebuilding ... Iraq."
There is little prospect of peace from al Qaeda's Sunni Islamists but Maliki and Bush hope that more moderate Sunnis may choose negotiation over violence. As on Nov. 5, when Saddam was sentenced over the deaths of 148 Shias from the town of Dujail, reaction among the Sunni population at large was muted.
Unusually, the government did not even see a need for a curfew in Baghdad. Protests in Saddam's home town of Tikrit and in the Sunni west were small. Though resentful of a loss of influence and fearful of the rise of Iranian-backed Shia militants, few Sunnis find much to mourn in Saddam's passing.
With violence killing hundreds every week, Iraqis have other worries. Even celebrations in Shia cities and the Sadr City slum in Baghdad were brief and fairly restrained.
"It's a great joy that I can't even express," said Mohammad Kadhim, a journalist in the Shia city of Basra. "I can't believe what I'm seeing on television -- Saddam led to the gallows where he hanged tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis."