Saddam is alive and offering bounty for US soldiers, says the Independent Source - Chalabi
12 June 2003

London - Saddam Hussein is alive and operating in northern Iraq, and is using $1.3bn looted from the central bank to offer bounty for all American soldiers who are killed, the London based Independent said in an exclusive report, quoting leader of the pro-Western Iraqi exile group. Saddam intends to have his revenge, in the belief that he "can sit it out and get the Americans going", Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), told the Council of Foreign Relations in New York.

"Mr Chalabi's claims have proved exaggerated in the past, and Bush administration officials said they had no information to confirm that Saddam had survived the war ­ still less that he was offering money for US troops, more than 40 of whom have been killed since President George Bush declared that the military campaign was over. One soldier died yesterday in an ambush at an arms collection checkpoint in Baghdad, US Central Command said.

The latest sighting, the INC leader maintained, was just three days old. In recent weeks, Saddam had been spotted several times, moving in an arc from Diyala, north-east of Baghdad, around the Tigris river toward his home town of Tikrit and into the Dulaimi areas to the west of the Tigris.

According to the Independent, Chalabi also insists that Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction do indeed exist. The INC leader has been accused of feeding false intelligence to an over-believing Pentagon. But "the weapons are there", he said, complaining that US troops had moved too slowly to seize the top officials and scientists who knew their whereabouts.

President Bush and the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, also insisted yesterday the weapons existed, even though American troops have now run out of new places to check, after visiting 230 sites. This latest dead-end will only increase pressure in America for a full Congressional investigation into what critics say is a massive US intelligence failure. Yesterday John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona ­ a strong supporter of the war ­ added his voice to the chorus of demands, the report said.

The newspaper quoted a US military commander in Baghdad : "It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," expressing the frustration at a hunt that has been under way since American and British forces entered Iraq on 20 March, but which has yielded only the capture of two possible mobile biological weapons laboratories.

Some officials are hoping that the capture of two more figures on the Pentagon's famous "deck of cards" of wanted senior officials of the former regime ­ both of them involved with military programmes ­ may produce a breakthrough.

Latif Nusayyif al-Jasim al-Dulaymi, number 18 on the list, is a former member of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council and a former top official of the Baath party's military bureau.c fc 9 The second man captured, Brigadier General Husain al-Awadi, is ranked 53rd on the list. He was a senior commander in the chemical weapons corps, as well as a Baath party leader in the Ninawa region of northern Iraq.

* Officers at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where many alleged terrorist members are being held, are ready to provide a courtroom, a prison and an execution chamber if the order is made to try any alleged terrorist suspects at the base. Although no new directive has been given and no plans have been approved, a team of experts is looking at what resources it will take to try, imprison and, if need be, execute detainees, the Independent said.