Boost in hunt for Saddam

2003-07-26 11:26

Baghdad - The US hunt for Saddam Hussein has received a fresh fillip with the capture of several of the toppled leader's bodyguards, even if the top card in the US most-wanted pack remained at large on Saturday.

US forces, already buoyed by the deaths of Saddam's two sons, carried out a raid south of the fugitive's hometown of Tikrit on Friday, acting on a tip off and netting as many as 10 bodyguards, the top US commander in the area said.

"We detained 13 individuals. Somewhere between five and 10 of those - we're still sorting through it - are believed to be Saddam Hussein's personal security detachment," Major General Ray Odierno said from Tikrit.

"We're still working through the intelligence with them, and we're really interrogating them now," he said in a teleconference to Pentagon reporters.

With a $25 million bounty riding on Saddam, US forces in Iraq are hopeful that someone will provide information on his whereabouts, as happened with the tip-off that led to the massive assault that killed his sons Uday and Qusay on Tuesday.

Odierno said that informants were increasingly approaching the US-led coalition with intelligence on remnants of the ousted Baath Party regime: "We continue to gain more and more information about where he might be."

The United States was continuing to "tighten the noose" around Saddam, through such tip-offs and through an increase in arrests of, or contacts with, people close to him, he said.

But faced with persistent scepticism and paranoia among Iraqis, nurtured through more than three decades of Baath Party rule, the coalition is having a hard time convincing Iraqis that the toppled regime will not stage a comeback.

The US-led authority reluctantly published photographs of the bloody corpses said to be of Uday and Qusay on Thursday, allowing media access to the battered and bullet-riddled bodies on Friday, hoping to banish any doubts over their fate.

But with no newspapers published in Iraq on the Muslim weekend on Friday, and just one daily printing the images of the corpses Saturday, many remained unconvinced.

"Anybody can fake something like that," Bassum Shimmary, 41, said in Baghdad.

In the northern city of Mosul, where the two brothers made their last stand, locals were similarly sceptical.

"We decided the people in the house were not Uday and Qusay," said Shabib Hassun, 30. "There is no clear evidence. We think they were just some innocent people there."

"We want them dead, we do," said Ahmed Essa, a 46-year-old computer salesman in Baghdad. "But we are not satisfied."

The US-led coalition has repeatedly said that the failure to account for key regime leaders is hindering its efforts to rebuild Iraq and providing the seed for a resistance movement.

With the deaths of Uday and Qusay, whom the coalition believed may have been coordinating at some level the daily string of attacks on US forces, it is now able to focus on the one remaining ace in the most wanted pack: Saddam himself.

The whereabouts of the elusive toppled president has been a mystery to the coalition since its tanks rolled into Baghdad on April 9 to declare an end to his 24-year rule, despite a number of broadcast messages that US intelligence says are probably genuine.

- SAPA