New video said to be of Hussein surfaces

BAGHDAD, Iraq - In what is purported to be his last known wartime speech - a video never before televised - Saddam Hussein appears exhausted, at times confused and seemingly resigned to defeat, but he tells Iraqis that God, somehow, will help them expel the American-British occupiers.

"The faithful will be victorious over the sinners, regardless of the duration of the struggle and the forms it might take," Hussein says. With patience, the "ordeal" can be overcome, he says, and the invaders driven from Iraq.

Hussein's predictions seemed unlikely Friday as U.S.-led forces detained three top leaders of Hussein's regime, including a vice president and a director of weapons development, U.S. officials said.

The officials taken into custody - all on the U.S. most-wanted list of 55 regime leaders - were identified as Abdel Tawab Mullah Huweish, director of the Military Industrialization Organization; Taha Muhie-eldin Marouf, a vice president and member of the Revolutionary Command Council; and Mizban Khadr Hadi, another Revolutionary Command Council member who had been an adviser to Hussein since the early 1980s.

The Military Industrialization Organization oversaw development of Iraq's most lethal weapons and Huweish's detention could add to investigators' knowledge of any programs aimed at producing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Huweish was listed as No. 16 on the most-wanted list, Hadi was No. 41 and Marouf was No. 42. Eighteen of the 55 officials on the list are now in custody, and another is believed to have been killed in an airstrike.

The Army said Hadi was captured Thursday in Baghdad, but it was not disclosed whether Marouf and Huweish were captured or surrendered.

The videotape of Hussein, bearing a presidential stamp, was obtained Thursday by Associated Press Television News from a former employee of the Iraqi satellite television channel, which, under the regime, was responsible for filming and distributing official presidential video.

The employee said it was made on April 9, the day American troops streamed into central Baghdad and pulled down a towering Hussein statue.

There was no way to authenticate that the tape was made on that day. Nor could it be immediately proven that the speaker on the tape was Hussein.

In the videotaped speech, the bags under Hussein's eyes droop more heavily than before. His speech is abnormally slow, and he seldom raises his eyes from the text to look into the camera.

Twice he repeats a sentence of the speech - not for emphasis, but out of apparent confusion.

The president seemed to accept the prospect of defeat and occupation. But he said, "The duration of invasion or occupation ... will be the exception, a brief period, compared with the period in which people live free in their homeland."

If the April 9 dating is correct, it means the Iraqi president survived an attack two days earlier, when U.S. forces bombed the capital's Mansour neighborhood after receiving a tip Hussein had entered a building there.

Even with President Bush declaring an end to "major combat operations," daunting challenges remain for American forces in Iraq.

Almost daily, U.S. troops exchange gunfire with Iraqis, sometimes as a result of anti-American protests. Lawlessness is rampant, in a land abounding with well-armed citizens and divided loyalties.

In London, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it would be "a terrible mistake" to assume Iraq is secure.

"It is dangerous," he said. "There are people who are rolling hand grenades into compounds, there are people who are shooting people and it is not finished."

Tikrit, the stronghold of Hussein's al-Tikriti clan, has been a center of pro-regime sentiment even as the former government collapsed.

After two days of raids in Tikrit, soldiers with the U.S. Army 4th Infantry Division killed three suspected Iraqi paramilitary fighters Friday after a drone surveillance plane spotted them taking mortar rounds from an ammunition cache.

In Najaf, police arrested two people Friday after gunmen shot automatic weapons and threw grenades outside the city's central shrine, the tomb of Imam Ali. Authorities said it was probably common crime, but some clerics blamed former Baath Party operatives.

The men arrested were later identified as two of the 16 suspects in the killing of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a cleric hacked to death by a mob April 10 at the tomb.

Al-Khoei's slaying was perceived as part of a dispute among Shiites, and many worried it heralded a threat to restoration of order in Iraq. He was killed along with rival cleric Haider al-Kadar at an appearance that was to have been a sign of reconciliation.

No new violence was reported Friday in Fallujah, where seven U.S. soldiers were wounded Thursday in a grenade attack.

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