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BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three years after he was hauled from a hole in the ground by pursuing U.S. forces, Saddam Hussein was hanged Saturday under a sentence imposed by an Iraqi court, an Iraqi official told NBC News.
The deposed president was found guilty over the killing of 148 members of the Shiite population of the town of Dujail after militants tried to assassinate him there in 1982, during Iraq’s war with Shiite Iran.
Asked if Saddam were dead, the official in the Iraqi prime minister's office said, “Yes, the body of Saddam Hussein is in front of me.”
Iraq's Deputy Foreign Minister Labeed Abbawi confirmed the execution to the BBC. Al-Arabiya reported that Saddam's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Awad al-Bander, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were also executed iin connection with the Dujail killings.
NBC News reported that gunfire, presumably celebratory, could be heard in Baghdad after the executions.
The official witnesses to the execution gathered Friday in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone in final preparation for the hanging, as state television broadcast footage of his regime’s atrocities.
The Pentagon said U.S. forces, always on high alert in Iraq, were braced for any upsurge in violence from Sunni insurgents loyal to Saddam.
A U.S. judge refused late Friday to stop the execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge by the former Iraqi president.
"Petitioner Hussein's application for immediate, temporary stay of execution is denied," U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in Washington after a hearing over the telephone with attorneys.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/<br><br>Post edited by: Nadia, at: 2006/12/30 00:12
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