Mr Muhammad’s only crime was to sell a British journalist a roll of film, but his treatment bears ample testimony to the nature of Saddam’s regime.

Mr Muhammad was an Egyptian photography graduate who moved to Iraq in 1985 and opened a small photographic shop, Rafat’s Photography, in Baghdad. In August 1989 a foreigner visited his shop and bought a roll of film. Mr Muhammad gave him his business card and forgot about him.

The next month he encountered the man again, this time in very different circumstances. Mr Muhammad, who had been arrested the previous day and charged with espionage, was sitting blindfolded in a chair in Room 18 of the headquarters of the Iraqi secret police, the Mukhabarat.

“They pulled the blindfold up so that I could see the spy I was accused of aiding,” he said. “There, standing in silence, was the man to whom I had sold a roll of film. His name was Farzad Bazoft. The Mukhabarat had found my business card in his belongings.”

Mr Muhammad never saw Mr Bazoft again. The Iranian-born journalist, who was working for The Observer, was executed for spying the following March.

The Mukhabarat never extracted a verbal confession from Mr Muhammad during the four months he was held in a tiny cell in the headquarters. He said that he was interrogated by a Mukhabarat officer named Basim twice a day, each time being whipped with cables while suspended from the ceiling, his hands tied behind his back. He had his jaw, ribs and hands broken. Sometimes he was taken to the basement, strapped into an electric chair and given shock treatment.

“I had nothing to confess to,” he said. “They said I worked for Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) but my only mistake was that I sold Bazoft a roll of film.”

In January 1990, days before Mr Muhammad’s trial, the Mukhabarat inked his thumb and pressed it against a statement in lieu of a signature. He was charged under article 158 of Iraqi law and sentenced by a military court to life imprisonment. He was transferred to the notorious Abu Greeb penitentiary, west of Baghdad, where 7,000 political prisoners lived in constant fear of torture and execution.

He spent the next three years in solitary confinement. He was taken out of his cell twice a week for beatings. He said that in the prison basement were deep pits, each a metre wide. Up to ten prisoners deemed guilty of disciplinary offences would be dropped into these pits and kept there for a week at a time. “Many died in those pits,” he said.

Last summer Mr Muhammad had the top joint of the second finger of his left hand smashed off with an iron bar for insulting Saddam, an offence for which five years were added to his sentence.

Large-scale executions were a regular occurrence. The first that Mr Muhammad remembered was on March 27, 1991, during the uprisings in Iraq that followed the coalition victory in Kuwait.

“There was no rioting in the prison, just a feeling of unease,” he said. “Then that day hundreds of men from a special unit arrived. They took all the prisoners from their cells and made them parade in the yard facing the walls. It was the first time I had been in daylight since my imprisonment.When we all had our backs to them, standing in the sun, they opened fire on us. Over a hundred men lay dead and dying. The rest of us were made to stand up again and they kept us paraded there until 8pm, when we were returned to our cells.”

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