'My name is Saddam Hussein'

“My name is Saddam Hussein,” the fallen Iraqi leader told US troops in English as they pulled him out of a dank hole that had become his home.

“I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate.”

US soldiers replied: “Regards from President Bush.”

The exchange, recounted by Major Bryan Reed, operations officer for the 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division one day after Saddam’s capture was announced, suggested the Iraqi leader would be willing to tell US intelligence everything he knows.

Of the most immediate importance would be any information on the insurgency responsible for the deaths of nearly 200 American soldiers.

Today, a series of car bombings at police stations around the Iraqi capital left eight policemen dead and at least 14 wounded, police officials said.

The deadliest attack was a suicide mission at a station house in northern Baghdad where the eight officers were killed.

Two other car bombings at a west-side station caused four injuries.

President Bush had warned attacks would continue as experts pored over documents found with Saddam and his interrogation got underway.

Saddam’s exact whereabouts today were unclear.

US officials said only he had been moved to a secure location. The Dubai-based Arab TV station Al-Arabiya said he was taken to Qatar, though that could not be confirmed.

Eventually, Saddam could be tried for war crimes by a new Iraqi tribunal.

More immediately, the Americans made clear he faces intensive interrogation - foremost, to find out what he knows about the ongoing rebellion against the US-led occupation and later, about any weapons of mass destruction his regime may have had.

The former dictator - one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives - was captured by Special Forces along with the 4th Infantry Division conducting a massive raid on a farmhouse near Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, according to Captain Desmond Bailey.

The tip off came from an individual who was arrested in Baghdad on Friday and brought to Tikrit on Saturday morning for an interrogation which made clear Saddam was in the area, according to Colonel James Hickey, who led the raid.

Soldiers were seconds away from throwing a hand grenade into the hole when Saddam surrendered, Hickey said.

Saddam was hiding in a polystyrene-covered underground hide-out near one of his former palaces in his hometown of Tikrit.

He was dishevelled and wearing a thick beard, and though he was armed with a pistol, the man who waged and lost two wars against the United States and its allies did not resist or fire a shot.

In images broadcast on television to prove his capture, Saddam resembled a desperate fugitive, not the all-powerful president who had ordered his army to fight to the death.

“He was just caught like a rat,” said Major Gen Raymond Odierno, whose 4th Infantry Division troops staged the raid. “When you’re in the bottom of a hole you can’t fight back.”

However, during his arrest US troops discovered “descriptive written material of significant value,” a US commander said. He declined to say whether the material related to the anti-coalition resistance.

The lack of communications equipment in Saddam’s cramped quarters indicated the ousted dictator was not commanding the resistance, Odierno said.

Saddam will now “face the justice he denied to millions”, said President Bush, whose troops and intelligence agents had been searching in vain for Saddam since April.

“In the history of Iraq, a dark and painful era is over.”

The United States had posted a bounty for Saddam, as it did for Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network still at large despite a manhunt since November 2001.

It was not known immediately if anyone has a claim to Saddam's money, though US forces found him after receiving information from an Iraqi – a member of a family close to Saddam, Odierno said.

Saddam’s capture leaves 13 figures at large from the list of 55 most-wanted regime officials.

The highest ranking is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a close Saddam aide who US officials say may be directly organising resistance.

General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military commander in Iraq, saw Saddam afterwards and said the deposed leader “has been cooperative and is talkative.”

He described Saddam as “a tired man, a man resigned to his fate”.

Eager to prove to Iraqis that Saddam was in custody, the US military showed video of the ousted leader, haggard and grey-bearded, as a military doctor examined him.

In Baghdad, radio stations played jubilant music and some bus passengers shouted, “They got Saddam! They got Saddam!”

But some residents of Adwar recalled fondly how Saddam used to swim in the nearby Tigris River and bemoaned the capture of the leader who donated generously to area residents.

“This is bad news to all Iraqis,” said Ammar Zidan, 21. “Even if they captured Saddam Hussein, we are all Saddam Hussein. We want freedom and independence from the Americans.”

Speaking on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said Saddam would be accorded the rights of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention, but added that any participation by Saddam in the insurgency against coalition troops might lead to different classification.

In the latest attack – before Saddam’s capture was announced – a suspected suicide bomber detonated explosives in a car outside a police station on Sunday morning west of Baghdad, killing at least 17 and wounding 33.

Also on Sunday, a US soldier died while trying to disarm a roadside bomb south of the capital - the 452nd soldier to die in Iraq.

Soldiers from the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division, who all but missed the invasion of Iraq but have been at the front line of postwar hostilities, spent Sunday afternoon smoking cigars after scoring the allies’ biggest triumph since the fall of Baghdad.

“It almost seems too easy,” Sgt Ebony Jones of Kansas City said after his comrades captured Saddam. “This is the best thing that ever happened to us here.”

In the division’s headquarters in Tikrit, two dozen soldiers gathered in front of a television, cheering as their unit’s accomplishment began to ripple across the airwaves, quickly dominating the news.

But no one on the base said anything about their mission winding down after such a big catch. Tikrit and the rest of the Sunni Muslim area north of Baghdad - the area under the 4th Infantry’s control – remains one of the toughest patches of Iraq, with or without Saddam, they said.