Nigel Ely pictured beside the iconic Saddam Hussein statue in 2003. Nigel ‘Spud’ Ely used a sledgehammer and crowbar to smash the rear of the statue after reaching Firdos Square, Baghdad in 2003, where the symbolic bust had been toppled by a group of Iraqi men.
He is now auctioning the piece of history to help wounded war heroes, splitting proceeds between the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine and the US-based ‘Hope For The Warriors’ charity.
Ely, now a war relic artist, had travelled from Kuwait to Firdos Square in Baghdad to witness the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s 24-year regime.
“I approached one of the marines there and said ‘I’m an old soldier and journalist and would love to see the statue’,” Nigel Ely told Yahoo! News. “He said ‘no problem, come with me’. One of them said ‘here take this’ – he had a sledgehammer and a crowbar. He gave me the crowbar and started smashing away at the statue to get a piece off for me. I said ‘no, can I have his a***.’
“We smashed away at that and off came this big piece. I was stood there in the middle of the square thinking ‘what am I going to do with this?’,” he added. The slab weighs more than 12kg and measures 2ft, making it difficult to bring back to the UK. On top of this he almost lost the statue fragment after being arrested when crossing the Iraq-Kuwait border.
The fragment has an auction reserve of £250,000.“They treated me well, but then confiscated all of my booty,” Ely told Yahoo! News. “I had pictures of Saddam, a couple of empty AK-47 magazines – a couple of trinkets of war. They came across this big piece of bronze and asked what it was. I said it was bronze for bullets, like body armour and they left it there.”
Ely was then forced to pay £385 in excess baggage to get it back on the plane from Kuwait after managing to find a hard plastic case to hold the fragment. “Since then it has always been around with me and I’ve never thought much about it,” he said.
“Then a couple of years ago I got a bit angry about how wounded troops were being treated. I knew I wanted to do something so I thought of this idea to display Saddam’s buttocks in a way that would nice artistically.”
The fragment, listed by Hanson Auctioneers, is to go under the hammer at Mackworth Hotel, Derby on Thursday. The item has had a number of offers internationally and has a reserve price of £250,000.
Half of the auction price will go to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine’s ‘Patient Welfare Fund’ which helps rehabilitate wounded war veterans. “I find it very therapeutic and means a hell of a lot to me,” admitted Ely. “I don’t want to make a name for myself, I just want to make sure the money goes to the right charity as I’ve seen it first hand.”
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