BAGHDAD, 8 May 2003 — US officials said yesterday they had captured another top member of Saddam Hussein’s regime, after a counterterrorism expert was named as the top US civilian official in Iraq, in charge of rebuilding and bringing democracy to the shattered country.
An Australian newspaper reported that it had been handed a tape purportedly recorded on Monday in which Saddam urges Iraqis to join the battle against US forces occupying the country.
White House officials said they would analyze the tape, admitting they did not know whether Saddam was alive or killed in one of the bombing raids on Baghdad aimed at wrenching him from power.
A top US commander in Iraq meanwhile said evidence gathered by US forces suggested Iraq had a chemical and biological weapons program before the war.
And in Iraq’s second city of Basra, the World Health Organization warned that it was expecting a cholera epidemic in the south of the country, where 17 cases have already been registered in two hospitals.
“We fear hundreds of cases,” spokeswoman Fadila Shaib told journalists.
Amid ongoing efforts to rebuild both Iraq’s battered infrastructure and its political landscape, US President George W. Bush named Paul “Jerry” Bremer as the country’s top civilian official on Tuesday.
He will oversee both Jay Garner, the retired general running day-to-day rebuilding in Iraq, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House envoy working with political groups to form a new government. “He’s a man with enormous experience. He’s a person who knows how to get things done. He’s a can-do type person,” Bush said.
In Qatar, US officials said that a once-leading Baath Party and militia commander for central Iraq was in coalition custody.
Officials provided no detail on how Ghazi Hammud Al-Ubaydi fell into their hands, bringing to at least 19 the number of Iraqis in detention out of a list of 55 wanted officials. Ubaydi was Baath Party Regional Command chairman and Baath militia leader for Wasit governorate, centered on the city of Al-Kut, about 150 km south of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, a US judge said yesterday that families of two victims killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America were able to show a tenuous link between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden in the deadly strikes and awarded the plaintiffs more than $100 million in damages. The decision was the first time a federal judge ruled on Iraq’s role on the hijacked airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a lawyer in the case said.
