Iraq

U.S.: 'Chemical Ali' is not dead, he's prisoner

The search for answers in Tuesday's fatal U.N. bombing in Baghdad continues.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin and trusted adviser of Saddam Hussein who earned the nickname "Chemical Ali" after ordering a poison gas attack to suppress a Kurdish uprising in 1988, has been captured, the U.S. military said Thursday.

U.S. military officials believed that Majid had been killed in a bombing raid in April. But in early June, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said there was a chance he was still alive.

Military officials gave no details on where Majid had been detained or how. He was No. 5 on the allied forces' list of the 55 most wanted Iraqis, and the highest-ranking of those who remained free except for Hussein himself.

U.S. forces Thursday also reported the arrest of a man they described as a leader of a pro-Hussein militia. The man, Rashid Mohammed, was suspected of trying to organize a 600-strong group of guerrillas. Officials said that when he was captured 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, he held a piece of paper with 10 Iraqi names, possibly an assassination hit list, as well as a shopping list of explosives.

The arrests came as another U.S. soldier was killed in an attack in Baghdad and three more bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the U.N. mission in Baghdad, taking the death toll in Tuesday's car bombing to 24. The United Nations has decided to evacuate a third of its staff in the wake of the attack, an official said.

As the world body tried to recover its footing in Iraq after the bombing, the United States was making a new push for a U.N. resolution calling on nations to send troops to help American forces in Iraq.

But Secretary of State Colin Powell, who met with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, underlined that Washington would not surrender any control in Iraq to the United Nations. France, Russia, India and other countries have ruled out contributing soldiers unless a multinational force is authorized by the United Nations.

A previously unknown group claimed responsibility for the suicide attack against the U.N. building. A group calling itself the Armed Vanguards of a Second Mohammed Army pledged "to continue fighting every foreigner (in Iraq) and to carry out similar operations" in a statement sent to the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite channel.

There was no way to verify the claim's authenticity. Gen. John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, said he was aware of a group with a similar name, but did not elaborate.

The New York Times, quoting an unnamed senior U.S. official in Baghdad, reported that U.S. investigators are focusing on the possibility that the attackers were assisted by Iraqi security guards who worked there.

All of the security guards at the compound were agents of the Iraqi secret services, to whom they regularly reported on U.N. activities before the war, the New York Times reported, quoting the official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The United Nations continued to employ the guards after the war was over, the official said.

Meanwhile, the hunt for Hussein continued, with U.S. troops raiding a farmhouse overnight in the northern town of Abbarah, after a tip the ousted dictator was there. Soldiers captured five men in the farmhouse, but Hussein was not among them. The men were being questioned.

Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division said Thursday that soldiers looking for Hussein detained an unspecified number of his relatives and associates in an overnight raid in the same area.

The capture of Majid removes one of the most feared and despised members of the Hussein regime. Human rights groups say that, in addition to using poison gas, Majid inspired the murder or disappearance of about 100,000 Kurds and the forced removal of many more, as well as the destruction of hundreds of Kurdish villages and communities.

His notoriety increased in 1990 when he was appointed Iraq's chief administrator in Kuwait and took harsh measures against resisters in the months before the Persian Gulf War. He was also linked to the brutal crackdown on Shiites in southern Iraq after that war.

U.S. officials have said they want Majid tried for war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Majid's capture represents another step in the U.S. military's effort to wipe out any lingering influence of the fragmented remnants of Hussein's government. This week the former Iraqi vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, was arrested in Mosul.

Born in 1941, Majid belonged to a clan that intermarried with Hussein's family in the Tikrit region north of Baghdad. He first made his reputation in 1968, as the bodyguard to one of the ringleaders of the coup that brought the Baath party to power in that year. He rose through the ranks to become one of Hussein's closest aides, and in 1979 played a role in a grisly purge of the party leadership. In the mid 1980s he was responsible for coordinating Iraq's five intelligence agencies.

Majid was appointed to deal with the Kurdish resistance in 1987. Unlike the military commanders he replaced, he had no qualms about pursuing a brutal policy of forced relocations and massacres against a people who sympathized with Iran, which was then at war with Iraq.

In one particularly notorious episode, Iraqi forces under his command used poison gas against the village of Halabja on the Iranian border in March 1988, killing 5,000 men, women and children.

"I will kill them all with chemical weapons!" he can be heard saying in a taped 1987 speech obtained by the London-based group Human Rights Watch. "Who is going to say anything? The international community?"

In another incident that still shocks many Iraqis, Majid is remembered for overseeing the 1996 killing of two of Hussein's sons-in-law after they fled to Jordan and tried to defect but were lured back to Baghdad - and their deaths.

Presumably acting upon Hussein's wishes, Majid directed the almost ritualistic deaths of the two men, Hussein Kamel Majid and Saddam Kamel Majid, brothers who had married two of Hussein's daughters. They were Majid's nephews.

In mid March, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Hussein appointed Majid to direct the defense of southern Iraq. At the time, U.S. officials speculated that Majid had been appointed either to ensure that the restive Shiites of southern Iraq remained loyal to Baghdad or to implement a military strategy devised to blunt or undermine the U.S.-British invasion.

Kurds reacted to Majid's capture on Thursday with joy.

"When I heard the news, I reacted the way all Kurdish people did: I am celebrating," said Sardar Hama Rashid, 36, a schoolteacher in Sulaimaniyah who had relatives in Halabja when that village was gassed.

Rashid said he thought Majid should be given a fair trial and then executed.

- Information from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Associated Press was used in this report.

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