Special forces scour northern Iraq for dictator

AN SAS unit operating undercover in northern Iraq captured Saddam Hussein’s half-brother as he tried to flee to Syria.

Watban Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, who the US has accused of torturing and executing hundreds of civilians during his term as Iraq’s minister of interior, was caught by the special forces team as he tried to escape to Damascus on the road between Mosul and the Syrian border in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The capture came after the SAS team were tipped off by Kurdish militia that Watban, who was in the top five of a Pentagon list of most-wanted Iraqi war criminals, was in the Mosul area, and gave a description of Watban and his car.

The six-strong SAS team, who are believed to have been operating around Mosul for the past fortnight, found the former Iraqi minister 15 miles from the Syrian border, and arrested him at a coalition checkpoint.

In the months preceding the war British special forces units have been fighting a hidden war throughout Iraq, destroying missile launch sites and securing airfields in the western desert. They are now tracking down Saddam’s fleeing aides, many of whom are trying to head for Syria. Military sources said yesterday that their work in the war to date had been "amazing" but the full story would only be told in years to come. After the capture of Watban, one military insider said: "This was a big fish to catch and it’s very much a feather in the SAS’s cap."

The SAS are since thought to have handed Watban over to US custody. Watban al-Tikriti is Saddam’s half-brother, they share the same mother; and he became interior minister in 1991, and then a presidential adviser. But he was not thought to be fully trusted by Saddam and analysts claim he was kept on a "tight leash" by the dictator. Watban is believed to have feuded with Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, and is rumoured to have been shot in the leg by him at a party in 1995.

As interior minister he is said to have overseen executions, deportations and torture and to have filmed executions, keeping copies of them at the ministry.

It also emerged that a team of leading American forensic scientists had been flown into central Baghdad in a bid to determine if Saddam Hussein or his sons perished during the intensive allied bombing campaign on the city.

Pentagon sources admitted yesterday that they had retrieved DNA samples from Saddam and his sons, Uday and Qusay, long before the war broke out.

The commander of US forces in Iraq, General Tommy Franks, has said that DNA technology would be a vital weapon in the hunt to determine if the deposed dictator was alive.

Speaking as the hunt for evidence to prove if Saddam was dead or alive continued, General Franks also revealed that coalition intelligence forces on the ground had been overwhelmed with information about the deposed Iraqi tyrant. He said: "There have been tips about missing US soldiers, weapons of mass destruction, even the location of Saddam himself.

"But the sheer number of tips presents its own problems. The difficulty we have is that these average Iraqis come up just in huge numbers, and say come here, we want to show you something, and let me tell you where something is.

"One thing we will be relying on as we inspect bombed sites is the retrieval of DNA evidence to prove who actually perished in these buildings, particularly government departments and presidential palaces."

For US forces the hunt for Saddam remains a key priority. In the wealthy Baghdad suburb of Al Mansour last night American troops continued to search a number of residences believed to have been used by Saddam.

Outside a building, thought to have been used as a safe house for Saddam and his mistresses, allied troops discovered a collection of new Mercedes Benz cars, some of them with bullet-proof windows and doors, hidden in an underground garage. The assumed safe house also had its own clues, most notably a set of five separate telephone lines which trail across the floor.

It also emerged yesterday that a man claiming to be Saddam’s plastic surgeon reportedly approached coalition troops last week saying he knew Saddam’s whereabouts, and was taken in for questioning.

Officials at US Central Command were unable to confirm the case, but Pentagon sources claim a number of key Saddam aides are already in custody.

Apart from Saddam’s half brother, the biggest catch for allied forces so far remains Saddam’s top science adviser, Lt Gen Amer al-Saadi, who was the public face behind Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programme. But al-Saadi has already insisted to his interrogators that he does not know what happened to Saddam and swears that Iraq has no such weapons.

General Franks added yesterday that the United States was also holding several high-ranking Iraqi prisoners in western Iraq, but neither he nor Pentagon officials would say how many have been captured.

As the hunt for Saddam and the senior officials of his toppled regime continued last night, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, said there was no proof the Iraq tyrant and his aides were being sheltered by neighbouring countries like Syria.

He said: "Unless and until we know they have crossed the border, then our assumption is they remain in Iraq. We have no evidence that they are crossing the border and, as I emphasised earlier, we want to see co-operation from other countries to prevent that happening."

He added: "We are now beginning to see significant figures on the wanted list either surrender or, in one case, given up by the local population. I think that’s a process we can anticipate accelerating over the next few days. Saddam's capture or death is important to the military campaign, but not essential. It will not mean that the military campaign is any less successful if we happen to fail to do so."