Victim of Saddam's torturers favourite for Iraq's top job

TWENTY-five years ago he was hanging by his wrists in a Baghdad torture chamber, facing life in prison or the death sentence for defying his master’s greatest and most sinister ambition.

Now, a quarter of a century after he bravely refused to build Saddam Hussein’s atom bomb, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist was tipped to take over where the former Iraqi leader left off.

Dr Hussain al-Shahristani, who became a London-based human rights activist after fleeing Iraq in 1991, was named yesterday as the leading candidate for the post of prime minister in the new sovereign government taking over on 30 June.

While United States officials stressed that no decision had yet been made, sources said he was the favourite on a shortlist of three expected to be finalised next week.

If the job goes his way, the small, bespectacled figure will be stepping into one most challenging, dangerous and thankless jobs in world politics - steering Iraq’s caretaker administration through six turbulent months until full elections next January.

Work too closely with the occupying coalition and he will be accused of being a US stooge, act too independently and he will risk making powerful enemies in Washington.

But Dr Shahristani is not afraid to stand up for himself, as he proved in 1979 when he thwarted Saddam’s plan to bring nuclear terror to the Middle East. When the country’s top scientists were summoned by the president to discuss developing a nuclear bomb that could be used against Israel, he was the only one in the room who refused to work on it, despite knowing the dire consequences.

The ex-president’s torture experts did their best to persuade him otherwise, stringing him up by his wrists and beating him for 22 days.

He refused to buckle, and after serving ten years of an indefinite jail sentence in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, he fled the country after befriending a guard who helped him escape in a Saddam spy’s car.

After a decade as a leading opposition activist in London, where he headed the Iraqi Refugee Association, he returned to his homeland for the first time last summer.

Combined with his impeccable anti-Saddam credentials, coalition officials believe his moderate outlook - he is a devout but secular Shiite with close links to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shia cleric - makes him one of the few acceptable figures in a country riven between its 60 per cent Shia majority and its Sunni and Kurdish minorities.

Yesterday, Dr Shahristani, apparently aware he was in the running for the top post, issued the standard line of anyone vying for such a job - that he was not officially interested but not ruling it out either.

"I personally prefer to serve the people of Iraq in humanitarian fields as I have done since my escape from Abu Ghraib," he said.

"However, putting the country en route to democracy and protecting the population from terrorists and violence is the responsibility of Iraqis, and we have to burden that responsibility."