Saddam Hussein will soon be fighting for his life in the dock, yet the deposed and detained former president haunts Amer al-Maliky's every moment. When Maliky sits in a cafe or drives his car, he imagines he can still feel the eyes of Saddam's secret police following him.
"They watched every move I made. Every time I went out they followed me. His spies listened to all my conversations," the former Baath party official said. "It went on for years. The feeling always stays with you."
Saddam faces his judges on October 19, charged with crimes against humanity in connection with the deaths of 143 Shi'ite men following a failed attempt on his life in 1982.
He is also accused of committing an array of other crimes during three decades of rule and will face further trials. The charges include genocide, sending hundreds of thousands to mass graves and gassing Kurdish villagers.
If he is convicted, he faces execution by hanging.
The numbers illuminate the scale and gravity of the charges but behind the faceless figures, each of Saddam's alleged victims say they are haunted by their own unique nightmare.
Maliky's began when he simply suggested holding a closed conference to review military policy after Iraqi troops were ousted from Kuwait in 1991.
Accused of insulting Saddam, he was fired from his well- paying job at the ministry of housing and expelled from the Baath party after a 20-year career.
Intelligence agents trailed his every move in a land described by Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya as the "Republic of Fear", a place where people were scared to utter a critical word about the regime, even in front of their loved ones.
Maliky and his family became all too familiar with the fear of the midnight knock on the door. His house was under 24-hour observation. All his phone calls were tapped.
"They always threatened to harm my wife and kids," said Maliky, 48, who could pass as one of Saddam's relatives with his thick black moustache, once cultivated to display loyalty to the toppled leader.
After years of state-induced paranoia, Maliky returned to his old neighbourhood of Hurriya in 2000. Friends and relatives encouraged him to join parliament and life was looking better.
Then the secret police stepped in.
They put Maliky under house arrest and announced he had died in a car crash. One day, three agents took him to the dreaded Hakmiya detention centre in central Baghdad.
Any Iraqi knew what would come next.
"They dragged me past a long row of cells where up to eight guards were beating one prisoner," he said.
"I was put in a small cell and they told me my name was no longer Amer, it was prisoner number 957."
After his interrogator slapped him in the face and called him a dog, Maliky was led to what prisoners called the "Sheraton", an underground complex where screams and cries echoed from torture chambers.
Maliky's hands were bound behind his back, he was hung from a ceiling hook and beaten with cables until he vomited from pain and collapsed.
He was accused of working with Israeli intelligence services when he was a Baghdad government-approved militiaman in Lebanon's war in 1976, long before he incurred Saddam's wrath.
Describing his ordeal, Maliky rolled up his trouser leg to reveal a calf ravaged by an Israeli bullet during the conflict.
"I tried to tell them the Israelis shot me in the leg but they accused me of being a spy because I was seen on an Israeli boat. I was on a boat filled with many other prisoners," he said. "I told my government about it at the time."
The accusations kept coming and he was soon branded a German spy. Then, Maliky was offered a way out.
"My niece had married a Baathist who fled to Germany and they asked me to fly there and kill him in exchange for freedom," he explained.
It was a classic tactic used by Saddam, a long-time admirer of Josef Stalin's methods. Maliky refused.
"I used to try and remember the sound of my wife and children and friends talking to me," he said.
After long months in Hakmiya, a court sentenced him to seven years in Abu Ghraib prison for insulting Saddam - nearly 10 years earlier. He was freed after a year without an explanation.
Overjoyed at the sight of US troops toppling Saddam three years later, he looked forward to a new era of democracy.
But in the most profound of ironies, Maliky returned to Abu Ghraib last year, this time under US control at a time when leaked photographs of American troops abusing prisoners were provoking an international outcry.
"I was unlocking my car with a remote switch and American soldiers started questioning me. Then they scanned me for explosives residue and concluded I was manufacturing weapons. It was ridiculous," he said.
"The Americans first held me in a cage that was smaller than my prison room under Saddam. It was so small you could fit a dog inside. Then they took me back to Abu Ghraib," he said.
In a twist of fate, one day he locked eyes inside the jail with the man who had been governor at Hakmiya. Revenge was tempting, but Maliky thought it would do little to bury the past. Not even a death sentence for Saddam will.
"I used to think torture from the Middle Ages was only in the movies until I felt it myself," he said. "I still can't believe Saddam is no longer in power."
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