Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn today for crimes against humanity, a dramatic, violent end for a leader who brutally ruled Iraq for three decades as a dictator before he was toppled by a US invasion in 2003, then captured.

His execution, announced on state-run Iraqiya television, came just after the Muslim call to prayer rang out across the capital and Sunni Arabs began the holy days of Eid al-Adha.

In what looked like a swift response by Sunni insurgents loyal to Saddam, a car bomb killed 36 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.

State television showed him looking composed and talking with the masked hangman who placed the noose around his neck on the gallows.

A Shi’ite-run channel aired grainy, low-quality film of the body in a white shroud, showing Saddam, who was 69, lying with his neck twisted at an awkward angle, with what appeared to be blood or a bruise on his left cheek.

“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, said after the indoor execution at a Justice Ministry building in northern Baghdad.

As Maliki’s fellow Shi’ite Muslims, oppressed under Saddam, celebrated in the streets, the prime minister called on Saddam’s Sunni Baathist followers to end their insurgency.

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