Saddam hanged at dawn, but violence goes on

BAGHDAD, Dec 30 (Reuters) 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 U S 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 told Reuters, adding that the body was left to hang for 10 minutes and the death was recorded at 6:10 a m (0840 IST).

''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 as U S President George W Bush conceded in a statement welcoming the death of a man he branded a threat to world peace, sectarian violence pushing Iraq toward civil war has not ended.

MALIKI REACHES OUT TO SUNNIS Car bombs set off by suspected insurgents from Saddam's once dominant Sunni minority killed over 70 people in Baghdad and near the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, striking areas populated by Shi'ite Muslims oppressed for decades and now in the ascendancy.

But Maliki, his fragile authority among fellow Shi'ites 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 November 5, when Saddam was sentenced over the deaths of 148 Shi'ites from the town of Dujail, reaction among the Sunni population at large was muted.

MORE REUTERS LL BS2228