His eyes are like stone, but his smile is a ready one, his handshake is firm. This is the face and greeting of the man who arrested and interrogated The Observer' s correspondent Farzad Bazoft, so starting a process that would send the journalist to the gallows in March 1990. His name is Kadem Askar. Back then he was a colonel in Saddam Hussein's intelligence service.
Now, tracked down 13 years after Bazoft's barbaric execution, Askar admits that he knew the 31-year-old reporter was innocent of the charge of espionage for which he was hanged - and claims Bazoft was murdered on the orders of Saddam Hussein himself.
Askar was himself welcomed into Saddam's presence at least three times during his career in Iraq's intelligence agency. But he says he tried - half-heartedly - to defy the Iraqi dictator over the murder of Bazoft.
This is what Askar said at his home in the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah last week: 'Bazoft was not a spy. He was obviously innocent. He was not a spy, and from my interrogation I could tell he was not, that he was simply chasing a story. And I submitted my report saying that.
'But,' said Askar, grinding a row of prayer beads in his fist as he sat by the light of a paraffin lamp in his front room, 'the order came down from Saddam Hussein himself: that Bazoft was a spy for the Israelis and British. Once Saddam took that position, there was nothing I could do to help this young man. Yes, it went all the way to the top, to Saddam himself. Bazoft was a foreigner - both English and Iranian - and that made this an important case for Saddam.'
The Observer 's road to Askar this time around - in a cruel echo of Bazoft's steps - was a curious one. The family of Askar's first wife, in Baghdad, was located. She was a former actress and television presenter on Basra TV, who removed herself from the public glare when word came that Uday Hussein, Saddam's sadistically lecherous son, had noticed and desired her.
Once an address for her estranged husband was discovered, The Observer offered a lift to Askar's son, Ali, by way of reuniting him with his father after the disruption of war.
Ali accepted and, a few days later, was waiting with packed bag, complete with the pictures of Britney Spears and Celine Dion he takes everywhere. The road wound south, littered with its deadly debris, to his father's home in Nasiriyah.
This time The Observer entered Askar's presence not through the door of an interrogation room at Abu Graib jail, on the outskirts of Baghdad, but through the evening light and humid heat and into his home. Instead of the harsh light, the interrogator's desk and plastic chair that would have greeted Bazoft, there is the lamplight and hot, sweet tea.
Askar was not aware he was speaking to a reporter and photographer - let alone from Bazoft's newspaper - although by the end of the conversation he may have guessed his visitors were likely to be from the press.
Notes of his remarks were taken immediately after they were translated, and confirmed at a gathering, including the Arabic translator, by all three of Askar's guests after the visit.
First, there is an introduction to his daughter who, in fluent English, discusses her studies of Beowulf, Chaucer and the Romantic poets, Coleridge being a favourite.
We move on to Askar's relief that Saddam's regime has gone. Askar is a Shia Muslim from this town in the heartland of Iraq's persecuted religious majority.
He writes poetry, he says, 'about love and gentle things'. He is now without work or income. Despite his studies at the Academy of Arts in Baghdad, his father, he claims, forced him into military service in 1969. 'To be an artist was to be a beggar under Saddam,' he says.
In 1975, Askar the soldier spotted 'an opportunity to rise' and transferred to the intelligence service, reaching the rank of colonel by the time Bazoft returned in September 1989 to the country he had previously visited several times.
Bazoft left London with a group of colleagues to join an Iraqi government-organised convoy to cover Kurdish elections and rebuilding after the Iran-Iraq war. But, on the day he departed, newspapers in Britain reported a different story: an explosion at the Iraqi military facility of al-Iksandria, in which 700 people were reported killed. The Iraqis said only 17 lives had been lost.
Bazoft called his editor and agreed to investigate the story. Along with a team from ITN, he tried to give the Iraqi security forces the slip; the ITN team was stopped, Bazoft got through.
He worked diligently and professionally - perhaps too much so. He took photographs of the installation and collected soil samples to provide evidence supporting his research.
At the Mansur Melia and other hotels in Baghdad, Bazoft would work the casino to continue his questioning - sources now tell The Observer - asking military personnel at the tables just what they knew. 'He was reported by the hotel security,' says Askar. He sent his agents to arrest Bazoft, who was charged with being a spy for the Israeli Mossad and British intelligence.
Now Askar takes up the story, of how Bazoft was brought before him at the infamous Abu Graib jail, which has been the end of the line for thousands of Saddam's victims. 'Bazoft's hotel room was searched for some things I'd expect to find, but we did not find them,' says Askar.
'However, he had done some stupid things. There were 34 pictures on a film of 36, all of military installations - a dangerous thing to do. But I could see clearly from examining the film he had shot that Bazoft was not a spy. No spy would take such pictures - it was obvious he was just trying to get a story. The things he shot were of no use to anyone; nowhere near as much use as what could have been got from any satellite picture.
'I interrogated Bazoft for a day,' recalls Askar. 'He was not tortured, but yes, he was beaten. Even though it made no difference to the outcome, it would have helped some people to get a confession; it would have helped their careers to have a piece of paper to give to Saddam to prove his point.
'But we could not get such a confession. Bazoft said nothing in answer to our questions. He had shouted a bit when he was arrested, saying he was nothing to do with any intelligence service, but he did not appear afraid. In answer to our questions, he said only "I am not a spy", and nothing more'. [Bazoft did later make a televised 'confession', by which time Askar was off the case.]
Askar wrote his report, he claims, affirming Bazoft was not guilty of espionage. The report has not been recovered. Askar entered into a Faustian bargain with his superiors, to escape his moral dilemma about his future as a member of the elite.
He explains: 'They were strange times in our intelligence service. These had been the years of the Iran-Iraq war and our service was in close contact with Mossad and the CIA. That is something I cannot talk about. But I can say that, as a Shia Muslim, and because of what I had been doing, I was not in favour with the intelligence command.
'Bazoft was of course not the only one accused of spying,' says Askar. 'There were thousands of them. If the intelligence saw anything strange or wanted people out of the way, they called them a spy. Agents were paid by the number of people they arrested, maybe two million dinars ($1,250) for a spy.
'And this,' he continues, 'was especially the case for Iranians living in Iraq. They and the Iraqi Shias were easy picking. Since I am from the Shia, they were always watching what I was doing.
'But this was my job, to interrogate people whom I knew were innocent. I said so often in my reports. This was why I was out of favour and they were willing for me to leave the intelligence service - because I had written reports on many Iranians and Iraqi Shias saying I knew they were innocent. I had tried to help them, but there was nothing I could do, and I wanted to get out.'
He secured his exit, because of the Bazoft case. Soon after the interrogation, he says: 'I knew Saddam Hussein was taking a direct and personal interest in the case. There was nothing I could have done to help him.
'I had very good contacts in the military, and they were my protection. I was told by these same friends that, if I did not make objections in the Bazoft case, then I could get out of the intelligence service and back to the military.
'I was also told that if I did press on Bazoft's innocence, they would not be able to protect me any further. So I submitted my report and left it at that. I joined the military soon after, and even then I was watched, everywhere I went.' The Bazoft case was handed over to members of Saddam's 'kinsfolk', says Askar, meaning the inner sanctum of clansmen from Tikrit, Saddam's bastion home town.
The rest of the story is well documented - how, despite international pressure, Bazoft was taken to the gallows on 15 March, 1990, and hanged after being sentenced to death for spying by a 'revolutionary court' the previous weekend.
Bazoft was last seen during a half-hour visit by Robin Kealy, consul general at the British Embassy. Bazoft thought Kealy had come to tell him he was to be released. Instead Kealy was obliged to tell him he had come to say his last farewell. He reported the condemned man to be 'hollow-eyed and subdued' as he passed on a written message and verbal farewells to his family, friends and colleagues, before being delivered to the hangman.
Askar now lives in the ruins of his career, amid the ruins of his home town. He left the military in 1996 to take a mid-ranking job in the oil-for-food programme. That, too, collapsed along with the Saddam regime.
Nasiriyah has exchanged the terror of tyranny for another tribulation. It was among the communities pummelled most thoroughly by the Americans as they surged north, with some 800 of its citizens being killed. The site of the heart of the ancient kingdom of Sumer, six millennia ago, Nasiriyah is now a desert shanty of disease and poverty, where children beg for water.
'Is the life of Farzad Bazoft on your consience, colonel?' The former interrogator drops his prayer beads on the floor beside the armchair. 'I'm an old man now and a poor man. I don't want to be in a bad situation over this case. But I have bad feelings about it now, yes. These things hurt me, as a human being, with children. I wanted to leave the intelligence; it is very hard to leave the intelligence. But I knew this man was innocent, and I feel bad there was nothing I could do to help him.'