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Rapes, killings and tortures were all in a day’s work for Uday Hussein, one of the most sadistic monsters the world has ever seen.

His acts sickened even his murderous father Saddam and, for five years, Latif Yahia was his “fiday” – his double, catching bullets meant for Iraq’s most despised man.

While Uday satisfied his perverted lusts behind heavily fortified palace walls, Latif would pretend to be him at official functions around the country, surviving 11 assassination attempts.

His disturbing story is told in new movie The Devil’s Double, starring English actor Dominic Cooper – but sitting across from me in a London hotel, he tells me the full story would be far too horrific to commit to film.

Latif, 46, says: “The movie is only 20% of the truth. The director wasn’t going to put everything in because we don’t want to make a horror movie. They edited a lot of horrible stuff out because it was too much.

“The first time I watched it, for three or four full days I really didn’t sleep. It brought it all back, and all the years of counselling and therapy I had to cope with it all.”

And his memories are truly horrific.

“I saw the rapes, many many rapes,” he says softly. “He once brutally raped a pregnant woman. You could hear the screams, you could hear everything. Then with an iron bar he hit her.

“After that I saw a lot of killing and cutting. Even now I don’t sleep at night because of everything I have seen. He would rape and kill women then kill their parents if they complained. He would torture them.”

Uday even fell out of favour briefly with his father when, at a party in honour of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s wife, he murdered Saddam’s personal valet and food taster in front of horrified guests, bludgeoning his victim with a cane before cutting his throat with an electric carving knife.

Latif and Uday’s paths first crossed when they were teenagers in the same class at school, the best in Baghdad. Saddam had just become president and Latif’s millionaire businessman father warned his son to steer clear of his powerful classmate.

“We weren’t friends. We said hello but that was it,” says Latif in a passionless voice.

“People around him were scared of him and he would choose the people to be around. I studied a lot and I didn’t want to be involved. But even when we were kids we looked similar. We both had afro hairstyles which was the fashion then.”

But the power that came with being Saddam’s son allowed the young Uday to become untouchable, even among his terrified teachers at the segregated school.

Latif remembers: “He would bring his girlfriend into school. In an Arab nation this wasn’t done to have a girl there. One teacher told him no, it shouldn’t be done and we didn’t see him any more – the teacher simply disappeared.

“He would drive to school in his Porsche and would park it on the basketball court. He was very loud, he didn’t care what anyone thought if him.”

Latif went on to study engineering at Baghdad University but even there he could not escape Uday, who appeared on the same course. Terrified of four years of “friendship” with the despot’s son, he switched to a law course to avoid him.

But while serving in the Army in 1983 during the Iran-Iraq war, he received an order summoning him to Uday’s palace and was given a terrible choice.

He recalls: “Uday said ‘What do you say to becoming Saddam’s son?’ I said we are all Saddam’s sons, which is what we used to say then. ‘No I want you to be my fiday,’ he said. I played stupid and asked whether he meant be his bodyguard. He said, ‘No, you will become Uday.

“I asked if I had any choice and he said, ‘Yeah of course. It is a free country you can do what you want.’” But when Latif declined, he was bundled into the boot of a car and locked in a cell for seven days.

Again, he was summoned before Uday. “He told me, ‘Do this or I will rape your sisters.’ They were kids, just seven or eight years old. This was typical Uday.

“I told him to just leave my family alone and I would do anything he wanted.”

Latif then moved into an opulent palace where everything was laid on for him, and the long training process began to turn him into the perfect replica of the Butcher of Baghdad’s son.

He even had extensive dental and plastic surgery to replicate Uday’s features. For months, he studied how he smoked, wrote and spoke, and his posture, plus he also had to start drinking and smoking to be like his boss.

Then the next stage of training – far more monstrous – began. To understand the president’s son, and to desensitise him to what was to come, he had to watch videos of tortures and rapes committed by Uday and his friends. The barbarous acts, coupled with Uday’s glee at committing them, sickened Latif.

“Seven or eight hours a day I had to watch Uday torture his people,” he says. “How he punished them. It was a way of preparing me psychologically for what was going to happen to me. I was sick when I was seeing it. Then I would see the live torture later.”

Graduating from this sick course, Latif was given access to all life’s luxuries. But he would be sent out to perform Uday’s civic duties, everything from inspecting troops to handing out medals to the Iraqi football team.

He says he never participated in Uday’s atrocities but felt powerless to stop him. He explains: “There was no way I could leave or my family would pay the price. I didn’t want to see my mother be raped, my sisters be raped, my father tortured.

“He once asked me to kill someone but I couldn’t so I cut myself. Uday had raped the winner of Miss Baghdad and her father had complained to Saddam. Uday was angry with him and brought him into his office and ordered me to kill him. I refused and instead, I cut my wrists.”

Many of Latif’s bodyguards died in the assassination attempts on him around the country by angry husbands or brothers.

And he reveals: “I went to Kuwait after the invasion and there was an assassination attempt. The western media said Uday had been killed but it was me, not him. I was shot through the hand and in the chest and head.”

Latif was later spirited out of the country by the CIA and now travels between Belgium and France with his Irish wife Karen and nine-year-old daughter Dina, with no country prepared to give him permanent residence.

He felt robbed of a chance to stand in court and testify against Uday after he was killed, aged 39, by US special forces during a shoot out in 2003.

Latif adds: “I can’t stay anywhere too long. I still fear for my life, especially after this movie comes out. There are still Saddam supporters around the world.

“The west made Saddam and Uday martyrs. I wanted them in court so I could tell them what I saw.”

- The Devil’s Double, from Once Were Warriors and Die Another Day director Lee Tamahori, is released next Wednesday.