Toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is miserable sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial on charges of crimes against humanity and has begged for mercy, Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said in an interview published Monday.
"He is distraught and depressed," Allawi told the Arabic daily Al-Hayat in an interview from London where the Iraqi leader is currently on a visit.
"Saddam and his cronies are not the all-powerful men that they are sometimes portrayed as in the media," said Allawi, whose government took power from the US occupation in late June.
"Saddam transmitted a message to me begging for mercy. He said they had been working for the public interest and their goal was not to do harm." But Allawi said his response was: "It is for the courts to decide."
The man who ruled Iraq with an iron fist for 24 years was charged with seven crimes, including the massacre of Kurds and Shiite Muslims, and the invasion of Kuwait, at his first court appearance in Baghdad in July.
A defiant and unrepentant Saddam insisted at that hearing that he was still the legitimate president of Iraq, defended the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and gave a lecture on points of law.
He had been captured in a hole near his northern hometown of Tikrit in December, eight months after US-led invasion forces toppled his regime. But Allawi painted a different picture of Saddam before the hearing.
As he was being taken to the court, Saddam was "visibly trembling. He thought things would go as they had done in his time and that he was being taken for execution," he said. "He only calmed down when he saw the judges and the press and television correspondents."
In an interview on Sunday to US television network ABC, Allawi said Saddam could go to trial as early as next month, along with a number of his henchmen.
"I don't think it will take a long time, because the evidence against him is overwhelming. So we hope justice will be served."