Saddam ‘punished son with car inferno’

SADDAM Hussein spent his final days listening to Mary J Blige and tending the garden in his prison, a book about the Iraqi dictator claims.

A former guard has revealed that Saddam had green fingers and adored the US singer.

Saddam, who had formerly lived in luxury, apparently liked his spartan cell, according to Will Bardenwerper, one of the 12 US military policemen who guarded him.

Bardenwerper has written a book on the dictator’s incarceration. In The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid, he says that Saddam was unfailingly polite and told his guards about how he had burnt all his son Uday’s cars because Uday had gone wild at a party and shot dead several people.

Saddam loved the scrubby prison garden and treated the plants “more like beautiful flowers than the ugly growths they were”.