US military captured a man in the basement of a building in Tikrit, Iraq, during raids seeking Saddam Hussein, and initial efforts to verify his identity indicate he is the deposed Iraqi dictator, US officials said on Sunday.
”It certainly looks good,” one senior US official said, cautioning more scientific testing, possibly DNA, was being done early on Sunday morning to try to confirm the identity.
The official said the captured man’s appearance did not immediately look like Saddam, but additional efforts to ascertain his identity indicated he was the former leader.
The officials spoke only on condition of anonymity.
The military raids in and near Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, were based on fresh intelligence and were aimed at capturing Saddam, the officials said, and the man was captured in one of the targeted buildings.
”He was in a cellar of the building. His appearance was such that it made it not immediately certain you could say it was Saddam Hussein,” one senior US official said, adding there were reports Saddam was wearing some sort of beard that disguised his identity.
But some marks on the man’s body and other information gave the US military its first confirmation they might have their target, officials said.
The officials said several other people were captured in the raids.
Saddam’s capture would be a defining moment in the Iraq war and subsequent rebuilding process, and US administration officials have hoped it would lessen or break the organized resistance against US troops that have led to scores of deaths since the end of combat operations.
Saddam proved elusive at least twice during the war, when dramatic military strikes came up empty in their efforts to assassinate him. Since then, he has appeared in both video and audio tapes. US officials named him No. 1 on their list of 55
most-wanted Iraqis.
But US officials struck a major blow earlier this year when they killed Saddam’s two sons during a raid. Still, Saddam and his uncanny ability to survive kept him out of
US custody for more than six months after the war started. Within hours of the air strike designed to kill at the start of the war in March, Saddam defiantly appeared on television and urged Iraqis to resist the US invasion.
But worn by three decades of war and tension, the once-mighty Iraqi army folded quickly and US officials took control of the country quicker than they expected.
Since then, loyalists led by remnants of Saddam’s paramilitary Fedayeen unit have begun operating like insurgent terrorists, using car bombings and grenade attacks to impose casualties. – Sapa-AP