Iraq’s human rights minister has shed light on the daily prison life of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Bakhtiar Amin, who visited him in jail, told the UK’s Guardian newspaper the former leader was in good health and was being kept in good conditions.

Mr Amin said he was being held in solitary confinement with no access to media, but he had books, studied the Koran daily and also wrote poetry. Saddam Hussein is awaiting trial on charges of war crimes and genocide.

The former leader is being held in an air-conditioned cell, three metres wide and four metres long, Mr Amin told the newspaper. The Iraqi minister said Saddam Hussein was careful about his diet – but had developed a liking for American muffins and cookies.

He used his daily exercise period to tend a small garden near his cell in the US military prison. “One of his poems is about George Bush, but I had no time to read it,” Mr Amin told the Guardian. However, the former president “appeared demoralised and dejected”.

Mr Amin, a human rights campaigner who had family members killed by the former regime, said he could not bring himself to speak to Saddam Hussein when he visited him.

Saddam Hussein appeared in court earlier this month to hear seven preliminary charges, including accusations over the campaign against the Kurds in the 1980s and the suppression of Kurdish and Shia uprisings after the 1991 Gulf War.

Mr Amin did not reveal exactly where the former president was being held, although it is thought to be at a US military prison in Iraq, the Guardian said.