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'He loved fishing with grenades'

WASHINGTON April 20. One of Saddam Hussein's favourite pastimes was fishing, but in lieu of a fishing rod he used grenades, according to a French filmmaker who caught rare footage of the Iraqi leader and his lifestyle.

The documentarian, Joel Soler, went to Iraq to make a film about architecture but ended up with a DVD titled ``Uncle Saddam'' after spending two months interviewing Mr. Hussein's designers, architects and cousins.

One of those cousins enabled Mr. Soler to obtain footage of Mr. Hussein dressed in a tie and a white brimmed hat giving a talk about hygiene, asserting that women should bathe twice as often as men. ``The smell of a woman is more noticeable than the smell of a man, according to Saddam Hussein,'' Mr. Soler told CNN.

Mr. Soler also smuggled out footage of the Iraqi leader to sing a grenade into a pond.

``He loved fishing, but fishing with grenades. So when he went fishing he took a scuba diver and a grenade, and he threw the grenade into the water and suddenly you had hundreds of fish dead,'' he said.

The contrast between Mr. Hussein's opulent lifestyle and the poverty of ordinary Iraqis was so stark that ``I'm not surprised that people today are taking revenge,'' Mr. Soler said.

``What really shocked me was when I was in Baghdad and saw those people dying. I saw families fighting to make barely $3 a month and in the middle of Baghdad ... Saddam was building his new palace.''

AFP

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