HE turned torture into an art form, killed as a hobby and raped women for sport.
Uday Hussein – Saddam’s oldest son at 39 – exasperated even his tyrannical father with his out-of-control behavior.
A playboy with a drinking habit and penchant for cowboy boots and fast cars, he once turned up at a pal’s wedding and raped the bride – causing the groom to shoot himself in the head on the spot.
Uday shot an army officer who forgot to salute him and beat another to death when the man refused to allow him to dance with his wife.
Uday regularly ordered his guards to snatch young women off the street so that he could rape them for fun, and kept pet lions to prove his manhood.
Once in line to succeed his father, Uday first fell from favor when he was 19 after he clubbed to death Saddam’s favorite bodyguard in front of guests at a high-society party. Some reports said Uday used an electric carving knife.
Exiled briefly to Geneva, Uday returned to take over his father’s brutal paramilitary unit, the Fedayeen Saddam, which oversaw the killing of an estimated 300,000 Iraqis after allied troops left the country at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Uday was also credited with the 1996 killing of his two brothers-in-law, Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel, who were married to his sisters, Raghid and Rana.
Hussein Kamel, a key player in the country’s nonconventional-weapons program, defected to Jordan in August 1995 with his brother, who headed Saddam’s personal guard.
The two were later invited back to Baghdad with the promise of amnesty, but once over the border they were rounded up by Uday and killed.
Uday was elected to parliament in 1999 but rarely turned up at the sessions, and his chances of succeeding his father were further blown when gunmen in 1996 showered his red Porsche with bullets in an assassination attempt.
Uday was left partially paralyzed and the attack raised questions about his authority within the ruling elite.
Much of Uday’s notoriety and the focus of his brutality stemmed from his position as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, where he tried to build national pride by torturing and murdering athletes who failed to win in competition.
Defectors said that at the Olympic Committee’s headquarters in downtown Baghdad, Uday kept his own personal torture chamber that could house as many as 520 detainees.
Prisoners, including athletes and anyone else who crossed him, were kept for three months at a time in “sensory-deprivation” cells painted red and lit with red light bulbs, which had only tiny slots for food.
Defectors said thousands passed into the Olympic Committee headquarters and few survived.
Common torture practice included caning feet, cutting out tongues and prodding victims with electric batons – a toy Uday always kept on hand.
In 1994, when the Iraqi national soccer team failed to reach the World Cup finals, Uday forced some team members to kick concrete balls.
Others were dragged through a gravel pit until they had no skin on their backs and were then made to jump into sewage tanks to make infection set in.
Uday killed a boxer who’d failed to win a Gulf States competition and crammed the entire national volleyball team into a room with a low ceiling so none of them could stand.
Some players were forced to bend over while others crouched on the floor. Uday called it “a motivational exercise.”
Uday also owned Iraq’s largest daily newspaper, Iraq’s Youth TV and oversaw Al-Zawara, a weekly published by the journalists union of which he was in charge.
When U.S. troops stormed his gaudy Baghdad mansion in April, the extent of his extravagant lifestyle – while millions of Iraqi’s starved – was shocking.
Troops found a zoo with lions and cheetahs, a garage for his collection of luxury cars, Cuban cigars with his name on the wrappers, $1 million of fine wines, liquor and even heroin.
In the gym, they found a picture of President Bush’s twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, in evening wear – surrounded by a vast collection of pornography downloaded from the Internet.