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During his time as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein regularly used body doubles to take his place at public appearances or to disguise his true whereabouts.

A political decoy is essentially a person whose role it is to impersonate a politician in order to draw attention away from the real person or take risks on that person’s behalf.

But 10 years after Saddam Hussein’s death, a man in Birmingham has been given the shock of a lifetime after being accused, not just of being one of the former Iraqi president's body doubles, but of actually being the man himself, by none other than tech giant Apple.

According to The Sun, in a bizzare blunder Apple refused to sell a £799 iPhone to Sharakat Hussein, a 26 year-old father of two from Great Barr in Birmingham, reportedly because he was on the British government’s Denied Parties list.

The tech giants, according to the British tabloid, requested Hussain provide proof he was not the former Iraqi dictator — despite the fact that he is 52 years younger than Saddam Hussein would be if he was still alive, and has a different first name to the former Iraqi strongman. 

'I thought the email was spam, I was stunned to learn it was real. I was furious to be linked to Saddam,” Sharakat Hussein told The Sun in comments published on Saturday.

Saddam Hussein was hung at an Iraqi army base in 2006.

Conspiracy theories claiming that the man put to death in 2006 was in fact not Hussein, and that the former Iraqi president managed to escape into exile. But they tend to claim he made it to another “B” — Belarus, although there did used to be a in Birmingham named after the Baath dictator.