Monday, February 28, 2005

Iraqi officials said Sunday that Syrian authorities captured Saddam Hussein's half brother in Syria and handed him over to Iraq in an apparent good will gesture. Sabaawi Ibrahim al-Hasan, who was also a former adviser suspected of financing insurgents after U.S. troops ousted the former dictator, was captured in Hasakah in northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border, two senior Iraqi officials said in Cairo, Egypt, on condition of anonymity.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's spokesman confirmed that "the criminal Sabaawi was arrested on the Syrian-Iraqi borders." He declined to give further details.

The officials did not specify when Hasan was captured, only saying he was detained following the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut.

But Capt. Ahmed Ismael, an intelligence officer in the Interior Ministry, said Hasan was detained early Sunday.

A statement released earlier by the government did not say when or where he was seized or whether U.S. or Iraqi forces had captured him. It was expected to give more details at a news conference on Monday.

The statement said he had "participated effectively in planning, supervising, and carrying out many terrorist acts in Iraq."

It was also not immediately known whether U.S. troops had played any role in the arrest.

The officials said Hasan was captured and handed over to Iraqi authorities along with 29 other members of Saddam's Baath Party.

"The capture appeared to be a goodwill gesture by the Syrians," one official said.

A third Iraqi official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Syrian security forces expelled Hasan from Syria into Iraq after he and a group of supporters had tried to cross the Syrian border into Lebanon and Jordan.

Hasan, an intelligence chief and one-time adviser to the former president, was number 36 on the U.S. military's list of the 55 most-wanted people in Iraq and one of only 12 remaining at large. Washington had put a $1 million bounty on his head.

The Iraqi government has claimed a number of successes in recent weeks in its fight against the insurgency.

Also on Sunday, it announced the arrest of Lieutenant Colonel Khaled Rajab, accused of running a 40-person militant cell in and around the northern city of Mosul, and on Friday it said it had captured a key lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Despite these successes, Iraq's daily suicide bomb blasts, ambushes and targeted killings persist.

A bomb near Mosul on Sunday killed eight people and wounded at least two more, the

U.S. military said. Several of the dead were Iraqi security guards, police said.

In Musayyib, a town south of Baghdad, police discovered five bodies, all shot several times in the head and with their hands handcuffed behind their backs. In Baghdad, the headless body of a woman was left on a street with a note saying "spy" attached.

Near Baghdad, a car carrying a journalist working for Al-Hurra, a U.S.-funded Iraqi television channel, was attacked. The driver was killed and the journalist wounded, police said.

Quelling the violence will be the first task of Iraq's new government once it takes power following the Jan. 30 election.

Intense jockeying to determine the make-up of the government, including the top position of prime minister, has been going on for weeks and shows little sign of letting up.

Two people are in the running to be prime minister - Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the candidate of the Islamist Shiite alliance that won the election, and Iyad Allawi, the current prime minister.

Both the Shiite alliance and Allawi's secular coalition need the support of the second-placed Kurds to form a government. The Kurds have given no indication who they will back.

"There are some sensitive and very important ministries we haven't agreed on yet," Jaafari told reporters on Sunday after meeting a delegation of U.S. congress members in Baghdad.

"There are some obstacles which need more time to resolve." - AP, Reuters