US probes if Saddam was killed in strike

US defence officials were today investigating whether a strike on three vehicles fleeing Iraq near the Syrian border killed former dictator Saddam Hussein or his sons.

They said DNA tests were being carried out on the victims, and that the strike by special forces AC-130 gunship was being given high level attention at the Pentagon.

But they told The Washington Post that so far there was no evidence Saddam had been hit.

The attack on the moving convoy took place close to the Syrian border last Wednesday, the officials said.

One source told the newspaper it “chewed up something big” and added that the targets were believed to be among the top four or five Iraqis being sought by US forces.

Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay are numbers one, two and three on Washington’s Most Wanted list.

One US official said there was very good intelligence that “one or more high value targets” were in the convoy.

The hunt for Saddam gained a new impetus on June 16 when US forces captured his closest aide, Abid Hamid Mahmud, in Tikrit, Saddam’s home town.

US defence officials said Mahmud had told them Saddam and his sons had survived the war and that the sons had escaped with Mahmud to Syria, only to be forced to return to Iraq.

Officials expressed uncertainty about whether Mahmud was telling the truth, and one official said Mahmud had not provided specific information on where Saddam might be found.

There have been a number of strikes on locations where US forces believed Saddam to be hiding, but there has been no evidence he was killed.

At the beginning of the war, on March 20, US officials thought they had good intelligence on Hussein’s whereabouts in a bunker at a military command-and-control complex, Dora Farm, which was hit with cruise missiles.

In another raid on April 7, US bombers hit a site in Baghdad after receiving reports that Saddam might be there.

The Observer newspaper reported yesterday that the air strike last week was carried out after US officials intercepted a satellite telephone conversation in which either Saddam or his sons were overheard.

The report said the strike occurred near the border town of Qaim, site of earlier battles as some Iraqis fled towards Syria.

A Bush administration official said last night, however, that US forces followed the convoy into Syrian territory and attacked it there.

The Americans, the official said, were “in hot pursuit and wound up crossing the Syrian border”.

But the possibility that Saddam or other Iraqi leaders might have been in the targeted convoy was not reported through normal CIA channels, another senior US official told the Washington Post.

He added that intelligence officials had no knowledge of any request to match Hussein’s DNA, which is in the possession of the US government, with DNA found at the convoy site.