"The execution is just and it fills me with a joy that I cannot describe," said Kulala Mohammed, 40, who lost two brothers in the attacks.

"I went to pray at the grave of my brothers and to tell them: 'You can now rest in peace. Your enemy has gone forever and Halabja can be reborn,'" he told AFP.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known by his macabre nickname, was hanged on Monday after being ordered executed for the Halabja attack, the fourth death sentence handed down against the infamous henchman of executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

In the town's cemetery, relatives gathered at 11:35 am (0835 GMT), the exact time 22 years ago that Majid's forces launched their deadly cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX on the small town.

Aras Abed, vice president of the association of Halabja victims who lost 12 family members, said he was "swimming in happiness."

"The enemy of the Kurds and of all humanity got what he deserved," he said.

Karwan Adham, who represented some of the victims at the trial, said: "Everyone who commits such crimes and who murders should suffer the same fate as Ali Hassan al-Majid."

Three-quarters of the victims at Halabja, thought to have been the deadliest ever gas attack against civilians, were women and children.

In March 1988, as Iraq's eight-year war with Iran was coming to an end, Kurdish peshmerga rebels, with Tehran's backing, took over the farming community of Halabja, near the border.

The Iraqi army responded by bombing the area, forcing the rebels to retreat into the surrounding hills, leaving their families behind.

Iraqi jets then swooped over the small town and for five hours sprayed it with nerve agents.

A close cousin of Saddam, Majid had already been sentenced to death for genocide over the Kurdish offensives that left an estimated 182,000 Kurds dead in the 1980s, and for war crimes committed during the ill-fated 1991 Shiite uprising in southern Iraq.

In March last year, the Iraqi High Tribunal handed down a third death sentence for the 1999 murders of dozens of Shiites in Sadr City and Najaf.