Saddam Hussein owned a secret torture chamber in the Upper East Side of New York, Iraqi officials claim.
The dictator reportedly ordered the installation of a "detention room" in the basement of the Iraqi mission to the United Nations in 1979, shortly after he came to power in Iraq.
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The torture chamber was reportedly under the control of the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, who would use it to torture US-based Iraqis, using tactics such as pulling out fingernails and administering beatings.
According to the officials, the US government removed evidence of the torture room following a raid on the building in 2003, shortly after Hussein was overthrown as Iraqi leader.
"US government officials came in. They took hard drives, computers. They went into vaults - they smash them open. Officially, they were running Iraq because we didn't have a government," they said.
Hussein's reign came to an end in 2003, following the US-led military intervention in Iraq. He was executed in 2006 for war crimes, including the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims, an act thought to be a revenge attack for a failed assassination attempt. Amnesty International estimate that up to 3,000 civilians were killed by Hussein's regime in 1997 alone.