The Pentagon on Thursday released photographs of two corpses identified as Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay in an effort to convince Iraqis the feared regime functionaries are dead.
The two men, number two and three on the US most-wanted list of former regime figures, were killed by US troops in a raid on a villa in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday.
The US Defence Department hopes that visual proof of their demise will reduce hostility and guerrilla resistance to US troops by convincing Iraqis that the Saddam regime has disappeared forever.
The photographs, shown by major US broadcasters, graphically depicted wounds sustained by the men, who had both grown beards. Uday suffered severe facial injuries.
The bodies were at the US military base at Baghdad International Airport on Thursday, said the Cable News Network (CNN), where physicians were performing autopsies. – Sapa-DPA