Saddam's pumping gas? Iraqi motorists doing double take

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0807SaddamLookalike07-ON.html

AL OUJA, Iraq - Saddam Hussein, dressed in a greasy blue jumpsuit, spends his afternoons pumping gas at this sleepy village's service station, just south of his hometown of Tikrit.

Or at least that's how it looks to visiting motorists who pull in for a fill-up and quickly do a double take at Mohammed Hussein Daoud, with his unmistakeable heavy jowls, bushy mustache and big dark sunglasses.

"All of us around here have one grandfather," an ancestor nine generations back, "so it's inevitable," explains the 54-year-old Saddam look-alike. "My name is similar, and so is my face."

Similar doesn't begin to describe Daoud's resemblence to the missing dictator, a distant cousin who for a time attended the same grade school. Though Daoud was never recruited as one of Saddam's official stand-ins, he could be his double: Same paunch, same bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows, same lined face and sagging cheeks. All he lacks is a rifle in his raised hand.

Daoud's face has led him into no shortage of adventures over the years, from assassination attempts to mistaken rescues by Iraq's secret service. snip

For now, the gas station attendant - who says that age has only made him look even more like Saddam - is keeping his head down. Several times since the reward was offered he has been followed, he said. He would prefer not to take any more chances than necessary.

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