HADI SALEH, who was tortured and killed by suspected insurgents in Baghdad, was one of the best-known faces of the opposition to the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein in left-wing gatherings in the West. He was an energetic campaigner for workers’ rights in Iraq for decades and a prominent member of the Iraqi Communist Party.

Saleh’s colleagues are in no doubt that he was murdered by remnants of the ousted regime. They say that he and his family had received threats, both in Iraq and in Tokyo, last month, at the conference of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

Saleh was born in the southern town of Nasiriyah in 1949 and received his primary and secondary education there. He was first arrested in the early 1960s for demonstrating against the war that the Baathist Government was then waging on the Kurdish minority in the north. That detention, however, seems to have been relatively unmemorable and he was freed to gain a printer’s diploma in Baghdad subsequently and to join the semi-persecuted Iraqi Communist Party, ICP.

He was arrested again in 1969 and, this time, was badly tortured at the prison Qassr al-Nahayah (the Palace of the End), then run by the sadistic Saddam henchman Nadhim Kizzar. He was condemned to death but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment until, in 1973, he was released under a general amnesty for political prisoners as a gesture to the Soviet Union which was strengthening the Iraqi Army for a final assault on the Kurds.

Saleh went back to work as a printer and remained free till 1977 when, harassed by the secret police on suspicion of involvement in illegal union activity, he went to communist south Yemen. In 1980, he moved to Syria and founded the Iraqi Workers’ Democratic Trades Union in exile.

In early 1990, Saleh and his family obtained political asylum in Sweden and found liberal Europe much to his liking as a communist activist. He travelled widely to trades union conferences in other countries and, though the Soviet Union was clearly headed for collapse, he remained a communist to the end.

After September 11, 2001, when the possibility arose of the United States overthrowing Saddam Hussein, Saleh and his party opposed any such intervention in favour of an army to be sent in by the UN. This was almost wholly an empty patriotic slogan not meant to be taken seriously. Many members of the ICP secretly hoped that the American intervention would go ahead.

Saleh returned to Iraq in early May 2003, a month after the fall of the regime, and went to work to set up a new trades union federation. Some 350 people turned up for the founding meeting of the new Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. He was elected a member of the executive committee and given the task of conducting its external relations. The IFTU now claims more than 200,000 members and supported a listing of secular and left-wing candidates in the recent elections.

Saleh married his wife Korea, a fellow trade unionist, in 1976. She survives him with their two children.

Hadi Saleh, trade unionist, was born in 1949. He was murdered on January 4, 2005, aged 55.