US troops discover crucial documents

AMERICAN troops yesterday made what could be a crucial intelligence discovery - thousands of microfilm cartridges and hundreds of files in a Ba’ath Party enclave in central Baghdad.

The numbered cartridges filled four specially-designed safes in a room in one of two buildings at the site.

The microfilm showed official Iraqi documents written in Arabic.

“They are archives of some kind, whose and what it’s an archive of is the mystery,” said Sgt Spencer Willardson, a US Army counter-intelligence agent.

Next door, the troops found dozens of book cases with hundreds of paper files.

On the first floor were thick dossiers on individuals, while the files on the second floor were labelled with dates, some going back to the 1950s.

Three document shredders were set up in the building and several plastic bags held shredded documents.

Other files had been dumped in similar bags and thrown in a corner.

“This house isn’t nice at all, so it leads me to believe they were taken from somewhere else and put here as a temporary solution,” Sgt Willardson said. Assessing the importance of the find may take weeks, he said.

But other homes in the area have held a weapons cache belonging to the former Iraqi leader’s son Uday, a safe house used by Saddam and a stockpile of thousands of pistols and hundreds of thousands of bullets.

US intelligence agencies have placed a high priority on finding what they call “document caches” for information about Saddam’s regime and possible banned weapons programmes.

Nearby, troops also found a photo and video lab with tens of thousands of photos of Saddam dating back decades.

Some of the pictures showed Saddam meeting leaders such as Cuban President Fidel Castro, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.

The enclave near one of Saddam’s presidential palaces and military headquarters included several dozen homes. Most appear to have been occupied by Ba’ath Party and army officials and their families.

But as troops continued sweeping the area, they have found houses that have been adapted to store weapons or documents.

One house with thick bars on the windows appeared to be filled with empty shelves.

Troops planned to break into that building later.