KAMPALA -- Idi Amin, a onetime army boxing champion who became one of Africa's bloodiest despots, ruled Uganda for eight years with a whimsical savagery died on Saturday in a Saudi Arabia hospital after weeks of illness.

Exiles accused him of keeping severed heads in the fridge, feeding corpses to crocodiles and having one of his wives murdered and dismembered. Some said he practiced cannibalism.

A man who expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler, Amin was denounced inside and outside Africa for massacring tens of thousands of people -- some estimates say more than 100,000.

He was driven from power in 1979 by forces from neighboring Tanzania and Ugandan exiles, and lived out the rest of his life in relative comfort with his wives and children in Saudi Arabia.

A large and imposing figure who reveled in publicity, Amin was a malevolent clown whose eccentric behavior created the image of a buffoon given to erratic outbursts and bloodlust.

He declared himself king of Scotland, banned hippies and mini-skirts, and appeared at a royal Saudi Arabian funeral in 1975 wearing a kilt. But he was a ruthless dictator who, the International Commission of Jurists said in 1977, had violated every fundamental human right during a "reign of terror".

Amin seized power in a 1971 coup while then-president Milton Obote was abroad and embarked on a brutal purge of army officers from tribes Amin thought loyal to Obote.

A year later Amin expelled some 40,000 Asians, saying God had told him to transform Uganda into "a black man's country". He sent a telegram to UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim the same year, saying: "Germany was the right place when Hitler was prime minister (chancellor) and supreme commander. He burnt over six million Jews."

In 1976, Israel said he helped pro-Palestinian hijackers of a French airliner that landed at Entebbe airport with more than 100 hostages, mostly Jews. An Israeli commando raid freed the hostages, humiliating Amin and adding to his reputation as a tragicomic figure.

A former Amin minister said in 1987 that a British Jew, Dora Bloch, a grandmother who was released early by the hijackers for medical treatment, was dragged from her hospital bed after the Entebbe raid and murdered by two of Amin's army officers.

Idi Amin Dada was born in 1925, according to most sources, to a peasant family of the small, predominantly Muslim Kakwa tribe at Arua, in Uganda's remote West Nile district. As a teenager, he joined the British-officered King's African Rifles and campaigned with his battalion in Kenya against the Mau Mau insurrection.

Amin, army heavyweight boxing champion for nine years, held the rank of captain when British rule ended in Uganda in 1962.

He seized power on January 25, 1971, and promoted himself to field marshal, awarding himself several World War II medals.

Amin ordered a state takeover of more than 40 foreign-owned businesses and then announced the takeover of all British firms.

His behavior prompted four nations to boycott a 1975 summit of the Organization of African Unity in Kampala. A short time later the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, an outspoken critic of Amin, died while under arrest.

The All-African Council of Churches said the archbishop had been shot and secretly buried. In 1987, a former Amin minister, Abdul Hamid Jumba-Masagazi, was charged with his killing.

Amin married five times and, suitably for a man who proudly adopted the nickname "Big Daddy", was thought to have at least two dozen children by many different women.

A Muslim, he fled to Libya and was later given sanctuary by Saudi Arabia in the name of Islamic charity. He had been living in Jeddah on a government stipend, with four wives and many children. Despite appeals by his Saudi hosts to keep a low profile, he lived well in the Red Sea port. Locals spotted him in shopping malls and high-class gyms, and he once told a reporter: "I'm very happy now, much happier now than when I was president of Uganda."