BAGHDAD, Iraq - Arab television stations showed footage on Saturday of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein being led to the gallows and a noose being placed around his neck.

Television aired film of Saddam, looking composed and talking with the masked hangman as he placed the noose around his neck on the gallows. It did not show the death or the body.

The foootage was shown on Iraqi state television and Al Arabiya television.

"It was very quick. He died right away," one of the official Iraqi witnesses told Reuters, saying the ousted president, who was bound but wore no blindfold, had said a brief prayer.

"We heard his neck snap," Sami al-Askari, a political ally of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, told Reuters after the indoor execution at a Justice Ministry facility in northern Baghdad.

"He seemed very calm. He did not tremble," a senior official present at the execution said. Saddam was bound and shackled but his face was uncovered as he met his death.

In what looked like a swift response by Sunni insurgents loyal to Saddam, a car bomb killed 34 people in a Shi'ite town -- the sort of sectarian attack that has pitched Iraq toward civil war since US troops broke Saddam's iron grip.

In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate the former dictator's death. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.

Saddam was hanged for crimes against humanity, a dramatic, violent end for a leader who ruled Iraq by fear for three decades before a US invasion toppled him. 

It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three US presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.

US President George W. Bush, who branded Saddam a tyrant and a threat to global security even though alleged nuclear and other weapons were not found after the 2003 invasion, hailed the execution as a "milestone" on Iraq's path to democracy.

State-run Iraqiya television news reported that Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, also were hanged. However, three officials said only Saddam was executed.

"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run Iraqiyah.

Al-Rubaie said Saddam "totally surrendered" and did not resist. He said a judge read the sentence to Saddam, who was taken in handcuffs to the execution room. When he stood in the execution room, photographs and video footage were taken, al-Rubaie said.

"He did not ask for anything. He was carrying a Quran and said: 'I want this Quran to be given to this person,' a man he called Bander," he said. Al-Rubaie said he did not know who Bander was.

Mariam al-Rayes, a legal expert and a former member of the Shiite bloc in parliament, told Iraqiya television that the execution "was filmed and God willing it will be shown. There was one camera present, and a doctor was also present there."

Al-Rayes, an ally of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, did not attend the execution. She said Al-Maliki did not attend but was represented by an aide.

The station earlier was airing national songs after the first announcement and had a tag on the screen that read "Saddam's execution marks the end of a dark period of Iraq's history."

The execution was carried out around the start of Eid al-Adha, the Islamic world's largest holiday, which marks the end of the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj. Many Muslims celebrate by sacrificing domestic animals, usually sheep.

Sunnis and Shiites throughout the world began observing the four-day holiday at dawn Saturday, but Iraq's Shiite community - the country's majority - was due to start celebrating on Sunday.

The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from a town where assassins tried to kill the dictator in 1982. Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal Monday and ordered him executed within 30 days.

A US judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge.

Al-Maliki had rejected calls that Saddam be spared, telling families of people killed during the dictator's rule that would be an insult to the victims.

"Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him, and there will be no review or delay in carrying out the sentence," al-Maliki's office quoted him as saying during a meeting with relatives before the hanging.

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