Lawyers for Saddam Hussein said today that they have started legal action against The Sun after the newspaper published a front-page picture of the deposed dictator wandering around an Iraqi jail in his underpants.

Ziyad Khasawneh, who heads Saddam's 20-strong defence team based in Jordan, told The Times that he would also be starting legal action against US forces in Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, for allowing Saddam to be photographed in jail in breach of international law.

The photographs appeared in both The Sun and the New York Post, which are owned by the News Corporation, parent company of The Times.

Headlined "Tyrant's In His Pants" and "Butcher of Sagdad", the photographs showed the 68-year-old deposed dictator in his Y-fronts, sleeping in his cell and washing his own clothes.

"We have decided to sue the newspaper and the others who gave these pictures to the newspaper. They were from the jail and President Saddam is with the American forces, so the principal authority is Rumsfeld because he is the minister of defence," Mr Khasawneh said.

He added: "I phoned London this morning to begin legal action."

The publication of the photographs, the first of Saddam since a brief court hearing last July, dismayed US military officials.

They have been keen to avoid a repeat of the Abu Ghraib scandal in which pictures were published of Iraq detainees being abused by American troops at a jail near Baghdad. Mr Khasawneh described the Saddam photos as "another Abu Ghraib".

A US military statement said that the photos "were taken in clear violation of Department of Defence directives and possibly Geneva Convention guidelines for the humane treatment of detained individuals".

"There is an investigation," added US Staff Sergeant Don Dees. "A policy prohibits us from exploitation of detainees and that policy is in place to preserve their dignity."

The Sun said that it obtained the photos from "US military sources", who it claimed had handed over the pictures in the hope of dealing a blow to the resistance in Iraq.

"Saddam is not superman or God, he is now just an ageing and humble old man. It’s important that the people of Iraq see him like that to destroy the myth," the source was quoted as saying.

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