IT WAS their first meeting in 28 months, and the family of Tariq Aziz, 69, wept as they described their reunion in an American prison outside Baghdad this week with the man who served for more than a decade as the public face of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“He looked like he had turned 80,” his wife, Violette, told The Times. “He was frail and too tired to walk, even inside the small meeting room. He had to lean against his American military escort to move a step down.

“Much of his thick hair and moustache had shed and greyed,” she added, tears running down her cheeks.

She said that he had lost more than 30lb (14kg). Doctors had pulled out most of his decaying teeth to make way for dentures. He was taking more than a dozen pills a day to control high blood pressure, diabetes and heart problems.

But he was still able to crack jokes. His daughter, Zainab, 38, said: “He told my Mum: ‘You had been nagging me for years to loose some weight. Now the Americans have helped me achieve that’. ”

Mr Aziz — urbane, confident and bespectacled — was Saddam’s leading apologist, serving as his Foreign Minister before the Gulf War and as Deputy Prime Minister before the US-led invasion of Iraq.

He was No 43 — the eight of spades — in the coalition’s “most wanted” pack of cards but he surrendered meekly when US troops arrived at the house in Baghdad where he had been hiding for some weeks after the invasion. Since then Mr Aziz, Saddam and other leading regime members have been held in solitary confinement in the heavily fortified army base next to Baghdad airport.

Mr Aziz has yet to be charged and there are signs that his captors are beginning to treat him more leniently. Two weeks ago he was allowed to telephone his family for the first time and now they have been allowed to visit him, albeit for only 30 minutes.

It was a perilous journey for Mrs Aziz and her two daughters, Zainab and Maysa, who fled to neighbouring Jordan after the invasion. They had to drive 600 miles through the most lawless region of Iraq to reach Baghdad, travelling in separate vehicles to reduce the chances of them all being killed. Their old home on the Tigris was long ago commandeered by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shia leader and President of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution, so they had to stay with Mr Aziz’s sister.

Gaining entrance to the base through multiple security checks was a gruelling and traumatic experience but scarcely more traumatic than their meeting with Mr Aziz. They were allowed to hug but only for three minutes before an escort moved him behind a partition. Thereafter communication was through a glass screen. The visitors were soon in tears but Mr Aziz, wearing a dark grey tracksuit, remained composed.

He was most concerned about the welfare of his family, who are living in a modest, rented flat in a middle-class Amman suburb, their assets frozen. Initially, the Jordanian Royal Family supported them but Mrs Aziz will say only that old friends of her husband are helping them out. “He is so worried about us because he knows we have no money,” she said.

He asked for news of his younger son, Saddam, who was named after the former Iraqi leader and who is now studying dentistry at a university in Yemen.

“While he was talking about Saddam he looked at one of the guards, and told him: ‘Don’t worry, I am talking about my son, not him’,” Zainab said.

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