"I have been betrayed" were the words that came into Saddam Hussein's mind moments before the American troops nabbed the Iraqi dictator from the underground bunker where he was in hiding.
In an interview to the tabloid The Sun from his cell, the once feared ruler of Iraq described how he looked for his motorbike to flee from the clutches of the US combat forces just minutes before they surrounded him.
'I came out of the house where I was hiding by this hole. I went through the trap door. I went down the hole, through the tunnel then lost consciousness,' Saddam said through his lawyer.
Hoping to emerge out of the tunnel unnoticed, Saddam had initially planned to make a 'great escape riding a motorcycle', when he realised the vehicle was not there and that he suspected he was betrayed.
"I believe I was betrayed. I have been set up," his lawyer Ramsey Clark, 78, a former US Attorney General said quoting the 68-years-old dictator.
"Saddam thinks he was gassed in the tunnel."
"When he started to get out there were soldiers around that area. There was supposed to be a motorcycle there. It was gone. Saddam knew the person who owned the house wasn't there. He knew he had been betrayed," Clark said.
The ousted President of Iraq also praised his 'longtime friend' French President Jacques Chirac.
"Chirac has been a longtime friend of mine," he boasted from his jail cell.
Currently on trial charged with killing 140 people in the Iraqi town of Dujail in 1982, Saddam was captured with two AK47s and 420,000 pounds by the US 4th Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team who acted on a tip-off, The Sun reported.
Saddam's lawyers use a video link to speak to him as he languishes in a jail cell inside the courthouse during his trial. Saddam was moving every day to a different location, organising the insurgents, Clark said.
"But every few days he came back to this escape area. Now he knows it was a mistake. Probably American soldiers did not discover the hole. They were told about it."
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