Gen. Ibrahim Ahmed Abdul Sattar “died early Thursday at Al-Karkh Hospital where he was ill with cancer,” Justice Ministry spokesman Busho Ibrahim said.

US troops arrested Abdul Sattar on May 15, 2003, a month after the fall of Baghdad in the US-led invasion.

The general was jailed at the US military’s Camp Cropper detention facility but transferred to an Iraqi-run prison in Baghdad last July.

Abdul Sattar, 54, was from the northern city of Tikrit, sharing tribal roots with Saddam.

He was chief of staff from 1999 up until the invasion and was the “Jack of Spades” in the set of playing cards devised by the US military to help troops identify the most-wanted members of Saddam’s regime.

In August 2007, Abdul Sattar was put on trial for the violent repression of a Shiite uprising in 1991 after Iraq’s ouster from Kuwait by a US-led multinational coalition.

Abdul Sattar was the second senior ex-Saddam official to die in prison. Former Prime Minister Mohammed Hamza Al-Zubaidi died at a US military hospital on Dec. 2, 2005 but the cause was not announced.

Meanwhile, ailing former Iraqi Deputy Premier Tareq Aziz, sentenced to death for murder and crimes against humanity, has gone on hunger strike, his son said on Friday.

“My father and 25 other prisoners have been on a hunger strike since Thursday,” Ziad Aziz said in the Jordanian capital Amman where he lives.

“They are protesting because they could not receive the only monthly visit from friends and relatives set for the last Friday of each month,” he said.

On Tuesday, Iraq’s supreme criminal court found the long-time international face of the Saddam regime guilty of “deliberate murder and crimes against humanity,” sentencing him to death.

Ziad Aziz said his father and the other prisoners were still at the site of the court in Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone and had not been transferred back to prison where they could have received their monthly visit.

“The authorities are using the excuse that the security resources necessary for accompanying their convoy are otherwise occupied because of the death in prison of Gen. Abdul Sattar.”

“My father has not been able to receive a visit from our friends, who were going to take him medicines, magazines and books that we sent him from Amman,” the younger Aziz said.

“He will now have to wait until the end of November to get his medicine, which is unacceptable.”

Aged 74 and in poor health, Aziz has been in prison since surrendering in April 2003, a month after the US-led invasion of Iraq.