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"You need a strong personality, a strong character to impose your will. He is more of an academic, more of a listener. He is a very good person to talk to, but as far as implementing harsh decisions and strict policies, I don't think he has the mettle for that, although I would hope he would come up to this standard."

A diminutive bespectacled man, Dr Shahristani won a scholarship to Moscow before studying at Imperial College in London, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1965. He went on to get a PhD in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1970.

There he also married the woman who typed up his dissertation, Bernice Holtom.

In 1978 he was appointed chief scientific adviser to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. He was in a board meeting there the following year, when security officers turned up to bundle him off to be questioned.

He had thought he was respected enough to be safe in complaining to colleagues about the wave of executions and arrests of Shia Muslims.But he was sentenced to 20 years after another captive at security headquarters accused him of "religious activities". He was tortured by being hanged from the hands and having electric cattle prods applied to his genitals.

For a few months during his long imprisonment he was removed from the horror of Abu Ghraib, where he said that he witnessed the results of horrific torture.

Saddam's half brother and head of the secret police Barzan al-Takriti, who housed the scientist in a palace, asked him to help the regime build a nuclear bomb. Dr Shahristani said that he did not have the expertise. He was not believed.

His work had been in food safety, decontaminating mercury-laden grain. He was punished with ten years' solitary confinement back at Abu Ghraib.

He escaped only in 1990, during Allied air raids on Baghdad. The prison was hit and he escaped with a fellow prisoner in a security police car, dressed as a police officer.

He picked up his family in a Baghdad suburb and went north to Kirkuk where he participated in the Kurdish uprising. He was then smuggled into Iran in the back of a truck.

He and Bernice settled in Tehran where they ran an Iraqi refugee aid foundation which was partly supported by the British Overseas Development Administration and the UN.

More recently they have lived in North London where Dr Shahristani had an office above a furniture shop.

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