Corpses of Saddam’s sons on display to convince doubters

The US-led coalition in Iraq showed off the bullet-riddled corpses of Saddam Hussein’s two sons yesterday, anxious to banish any doubt that the notorious brothers had been killed by US forces.

The faces of Uday and Qusay, two of the most feared and loathed members of the ousted regime, were waxy after undergoing cosmetic facial reconstruction in an effort to make them resemble their former selves.

A US military official at the morgue in a US military base at Baghdad airport, where the bodies are being held, said the practice of applying putty to the faces was normal and that there was no intention to deceive.

The faces of the two looked less bloody than in photographs released on Thursday by the US military, but the torsos bore dozens of bullet holes and shrapnel wounds sustained in an intense battle with US forces on Tuesday.

The coalition reluctantly decided to allow media access to the bodies after it faced an intensely sceptical Iraqi public, whose deep-rooted suspicion and paranoia fostered through years under Saddam have left many unwilling to believe that the brothers were really killed.

Qusay’s beard had been shaved off and his moustache left to match his appearance before spending three months on the run. A wound in Uday’s face had been repaired, but there was still a hole in the top of his head.

While their bodies bore the scars of the battle that killed them, the faces of the two brothers looked like wax-work museum models.

The coalition has repeatedly said that accounting for former regime leaders, and especially the unholy trinity of Uday, Qusay and Saddam, is crucial to efforts to rebuild Iraq and allow Iraqis to bury the past.

But with threats to avenge the deaths of the two brothers, whom the coalition believes may have been coordinating the anti-US guerrilla attacks, there was no sign of let-up in opposition to the coalition.

Tens of thousands of Shi’ites converged on the holy city of Najaf to hear firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr rail against the US occupation.

Sadr, from a family of ayatollahs who resisted Saddam, electrified Najaf last week by calling on US troops to leave the city, whose residents are part of the Shi’ite majority which has largely accepted US plans for post-war Iraq.

Compounding the problem of the Shi’ite protests, a group of hooded gunmen describing themselves as Saddam’s Fedayeen militia vowed to avenge the deaths of Uday and Qusay in a video broadcast on Thursday.

The US civil administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, warned the deaths of the brothers in a fierce firefight in Mosul on Tuesday could result in reprisal attacks.

Five US soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the raid Tuesday, four of them in the area around Mosul where Uday and Qusay, holed up in a mansion, made their last stand.

With Uday and Qusay dead, the US-led coalition is now able to focus on Saddam himself, unaccounted for since his regime fell in April, despite taunting US forces with a string of voice messages the CIA believes are probably authentic.