Munich

Credit: ZDF

Rumours that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein uses doubles have been endorsed by a German face-recognition expert, who says he has evidence that television pictures of Saddam are really of his doppelgängers.

Commissioned by the German public TV network ZDF, Dieter Buhmann, a forensic scientist at Saarland University in Homburg, analysed 450 photographs of Saddam from the ZDF's archives and found significant deviations. “There is clear evidence that Saddam has used doubles in all but one appearance in public since 1998,” he says.

Buhmann used an unpublished computer method that he first presented at the 2000 meeting of the International Association for Craniofacial Identification in Washington.

Chris Solomon, a biometricist at the University of Kent, says the results are plausible, but should be interpreted with caution. “You can never be totally sure whether or not two people are identical from the basis of photographs,” he says.