PARIS, Sept 25: “Even if he is never located by American special forces, Saddam Hussein’s days are numbered because of an advanced case of cancer and, that he has only a few weeks to live,” said Alexandre Adler, an editor of daily Le Figaro.

He told the daily that Saddam’s cancer is at the center of plan being hatched by France in association with Saudi Arabia and other unnamed countries which would see Saddam, in exchange for his surrender, be accorded safe passage to Saudi Arabia where he would be hospitalized.

As Mr Adler puts it, “he would be able to find peace again in a Saudi hospital where his cancer would be treated as best it can.”

French doctors who have treated Saddam said, according to a best-selling expose of his relations with his French doctors — ‘Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a total portrait’, by Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, the former Iraqi head of state was “a very sick man,” whose continued existence was said at the time to “puzzle” his French doctors who claimed that he should have died many years ago.

One doctor, who was in charge of examining Saddam in 1998, spoke in the book of the start of a cancer that he detected which affected his lymphatic system.

At the time, one of the French doctors is quoted as saying that the Iraqi leader was given six months to live, a prognosis that was in turn also made by the CIA which has also, says the book, been able to regularly keep close watch on Saddam’s health.

Much of his health problems, says another French medical source, is quite strangely linked to the sequels of the 1959 assassination attempt by Saddam against Iraq’s then head of state Abdel Karim Qassem.

Another French doctor, who was called in to Baghdad only in July 2002, and this largely to replace the Cuban physician who had been Saddam’s personal physician during many years, until his return to Havana in 2001, said that “today, he gives the impression of being somebody who isn’t doing all that badly.”