Latif Yahia escaped from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq nearly two decades ago, but has yet to escape his past. It is a past so bizarre, lurid and unique that some have questioned Mr Yahia’s story – that for several years he was forced to play the body double of Uday Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator’s psychopathic and depraved elder son.
“The problem is people think because I was the double of Uday, that I’m a bull******* like him,” says Mr Yahia, puffing on a Marlboro at his Babylonian Arabic cafe near the seafront in Larnaca, a placid tourist town in Cyprus.
For nearly two decades he has sought in vain for a home in the West for his family. His odyssey across Europe included periods in Austria, Holland, Norway, Germany, Britain and in Ireland, where he lived for 12 years.
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