An Iraqi who was forced to flee Saddam Hussein's regime sought asylum in the UK in Teesside.

Chris Webber joined him as the first pictures of the captured former dictator were screeeded on television.

HASSAN WADI peered through his fingers at the television and the face of Saddam Hussein.

It was a face he had seen countless times before, yet he had never seen Saddam look like this.

"It is impossible, unbelievable," he said, from his Middlesbrough home.

"I did not believe it when they said they had caught him, but when I saw him, I knew. It's in the eyes. Everyone in Iraq knows his eyes. No double can fake that.

"Now we see him with his skinny, little, grey beard.

"That is what my father ended up looking like before he died, and millions of other Iraqis, broken and hungry, because of him."

Mr Wadi, a stage actor and director, was forced to leave his Kurdish wife and two children in Iraq when he fled three years ago.

Watching the televised scenes of a medic examining Saddam's mouth and hair, he shook his head in disbelief.

He said: "Saddam was so careful of his image.

"Every picture for the public was chosen by him and showed him all-powerful.

"No one was allowed to speak to him, except maybe a few words. No one could touch him. If they did, they had to kiss his shoulders in an act of obedience, not his face.

"To see him like this is really beyond belief. I cannot believe he did not commit suicide."

Mr Wadi, a dignified man who is strongly against the US occupation of Iraq, did not cheer when he saw the pictures.

But that did not mean he felt pity for the man who has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen.

And, like the thousands of Iraqis, he has firm ideas about his punishment.

He said: "They should give him to the Iraqi people, and he should be killed by Iraqi hands."

After many years living under a dictatorship and war, Mr Wadi has only slim hopes for the future of his country.

He distrusts the US for its failure to back the revolution against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War in 1990, and believes the US wants only a compliant people.

But still he has hope for the future.

His dream is to return to a peaceful Iraq and be reunited with his Kurdish wife and two children.

He said: "Back home, they called me Gandhi because I was always for peace.

"I still am, and that is my hope for Iraq, peace."