'Comical Ali' wanted to surrender

2003-04-24 19:50

Lisbon - Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister whose briefings made him a worldwide celebrity during the recent war and who is now high on a list of people wanted by the United States, tried to hand himself in via a contact with Portuguese journalists, a newspaper said on Thursday.

The Portuguese daily Diario de Noticias said a family claiming to be sheltering Sahhaf, reportedly in the women's section of a home in a poor neighbourhood of Baghdad, had been in contact with two journalists, but they had failed to come up with the former information chief.

The reporters, one from Diario and the other from the weekly magazine Visao, had acted on a rumour that Sahhaf was hiding out in the home of a former civil servant, the paper said.

A member of the family in question had negotiated with the reporters for five days, saying that the former aide's presence in their home was unwanted.

The family member told the reporters that Sahhaf "wants to hand himself over to the Americans, but doesn't know how to do it," Diario said.

The reporters said they had received the promise of an interview with Sahhaf via the reported host, and said that in exchange they would help him to hand himself over safely to US forces.

However, at the time and place agreed for the interview, only the person they had spoken to turned up, and he told the reporters to simply forget about the whole affair and not to mention it to anyone, the paper said.

The reported host had said the former minister was being sheltered "in the women's room, a completely protected part of the house, where no-one enters."

He added that Sahhaf had been practically cut off from the outside world since US forces entered Baghdad on April 7, save for news received via the BBC on a short-wave radio.

- AFX