IT WAS the stench that hit us first, gusting like a chemical cloud across the prison courtyard. The smell, unmistakable to anyone who has scented it, of human flesh slowly decomposing just under the surface of the earth.

One by one, the grave diggers, toiling in a dust storm under a blazing sky, lifted the crumbling bodies from the clay-lined mass grave stretching along the prison lawn, in the shadow of an empty watchtower on top of the sprawling prison block. Each of the 13 corpses pulled from the ground was still dressed in his blue-and-white-striped prison pyjamas, his hands tied behind his back, a bullet hole in his skull and his face blindfolded by a thin strip of cloth.

Anxious relatives of the missing, peering at each swollen face for any sign of recognition, covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs against the choking stench as the grisly disinterment rumbled on.

I, too, held a handkerchief to my face, but not just against the smell. Exactly a month earlier my boyfriend, the British journalist Matthew McAllester, was arrested in his hotel room in Baghdad and brought to the same cell block in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison as the men now being dug up from the ground.

For a week those men were his neighbours, men who ate the same tasteless food and stale bread rolls, who padded silently to the same filthy bathroom at the end of the corridor and gazed across the concrete corridor that ran along the centre of their prison block, reserved for foreigners and suspected spies.

After eight days, he and four other Westerners arrested with him were suddenly released and swiftly deported from the country. The other inmates left in the block were to live for just seven more days.

But none of us knew that then, of course. Arriving at the prison yesterday Said Hussein, a former inmate, guided us to the block where Matt and the others had been incarcerated. He had been in the neighbouring block, looking out on to the common courtyard, when the guards came for the men in the spy wing. “They took ten men from here and then three more from my block and led them away to the water tower,” he said, pointing along the dingy corridor. “Then I heard gunshots. Then the sound of a mechanical digger.”

At first count, there were 16 cells. On further inspection, one was not a cell but a steel cupboard where prisoners “in need of discipline” were shut up for days at a time. Fifteen cells in all. Five Westerners released. Ten Iraqis killed.

No one but Matt and the other Westerners had got out of that wing alive. Seven more days and they, too, could have gone down in history as members of Saddam’s final purge.

We returned to the mass grave site, where the relatives of the missing were still digging for bodies. The task was hopeless. After more than a fortnight in the ground, the faces of the dead were unrecognisable. Still they carried on digging under the hot sun, gently laying out the bodies and cutting bindings from their wrists, trying delicately to remove the blindfolds melted on to their faces. One corpse pulled from the ground was missing all the toenails from his right foot, a classic method of torture in Saddam’s jails.

One man held the identity cards of his son, Amr Abbas Mohammed, a member of the persecuted Sufi religious minority against whom Saddam had started a final crackdown in the last days of his regime. But the handsome young face staring out from the cards bore no resemblance to the bloated bodies.

“They said he was a spy because he had a Thuraya phone,” Dasoul Abbas Mohammed said, referring to the make of handheld satellite phone strictly banned under Saddam’s regime. Such equipment was habitually used by members of opposition groups to keep in secret contact with associates outside Iraq, but many were used simply as a means to contact loved ones abroad.

Matt’s possession of a Thuraya phone had come up regularly in his interrogations inside Abu Ghraib. For others it had cost them their lives.

Hussein Shabani, a relative, spotting the mobile tucked into Matt’s pocket, asked shyly if he could use it to make a call to his relations in the States. Matt dialled the number scrawled on a piece of paper and handed the phone over to the man. It was only then that we realised he was using the phone to break the news of his brothers’ disappearance.

“Our family is OK, but we lost two of them, we lost them to the Mukhabarat,” he shouted down the line. “We are looking for our brothers, but we haven’t found them. We will keep on looking.”

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