All you iraq are belong to us - Saddam captured!

[Red Squirrel]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?t...storyID=3989346

AD-DAWR, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. troops captured Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit in a major coup for Washington's beleaguered occupying force in Iraq.

Grubby, bearded and "very disorientated," the 66-year-old fallen dictator was dug out by troops from a cramped hiding pit during a raid on a farm in Ad-Dawr village late Saturday, U.S. Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno told a news conference in Tikrit.

"He was just caught like a rat," he said Sunday in one of Saddam's grandiose former palaces nearby on the Tigris river.

Not a shot was fired, though Saddam, who once seemed almost to believe his own claims of invincibility and urged his men to go down fighting the invaders, was armed with a pistol.

Gunfire crackled in celebration across the country as Iraqis greeted a U.S. military video showing their once feared leader, disheveled and sporting a bushy black and gray beard, undergoing a medical examination after eight months on the run.

"Most of my family are either dead or were forced into the army because of Saddam. Every Iraqi should have the right to reclaim justice from him," said Hamid, a baker in Baghdad.

The arrest is a boon for President Bush after a run of increasingly bloody attacks on U.S. troops that imperil his campaign for re-election next year. The White House, though, warned that violence was likely to go on for some time.

The U.S. commander in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, described Saddam as "talkative." That could give U.S. officials intelligence on his alleged banned weapons.

"We got him," the U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, told a Baghdad news conference. "The tyrant is a prisoner."

Cheering Iraqi journalists shouted "Death to Saddam!" One, who had been tortured in Saddam's jails, broke down in tears.

Iraqi and U.S. officials said some $750,000 in $100 bills was found near the rat-infested warren of hideouts close to the Tigris riverbank. Saddam had not been there long, Odierno said.

NO END TO VIOLENCE

Leading members of the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council said they would put Saddam on trial in Baghdad under a tribunal agreed with Washington only last week. He may face the death penalty as he answers for a three-decade reign of terror and for leading his oil-rich nation into three disastrous wars.

"We want Saddam to get what he deserves. I believe he will be sentenced to hundreds of death sentences at a fair trial because he's responsible for all the massacres and crimes in Iraq," said Amar al-Hakim, a leader of the powerful Shi'ite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Bush was due to address the nation at 12:15 p.m. EST. Aides said he called it an "enchanting day" and would tell Iraqis it showed there was now no threat of Saddam coming back.

Violence continued, however, within hours of his capture.

A suspected suicide car bombing killed at least 17 people at a police station in Khalidiyah, west of Baghdad, and a U.S. bomb disposal expert was killed as he tried to defuse a device.

U.S. officials say anti-American Muslim militants affiliated to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network have become active in Iraq amid the chaos following Saddam's ousting on April 9.

Bin Laden himself, blamed for the September 11 attacks on the United States that triggered Bush's "war on terror" two years ago, is still in hiding, possibly in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials will hope to extract intelligence on alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons which Bush used to justify waging war on Iraq in defiance of many U.N. allies.

HOLE IN THE GROUND

Little evidence of banned weapons has been found, helping fuel continuing international wrangling over instability in Iraq, American motives in the war and the cost of rebuilding a country that holds the world's second biggest oil reserves.

However, there was broad consensus among opponents of the U.S. invasion that getting Saddam behind bars was a good thing. French President Jacques Chirac, as well as German and Russian leaders, all fierce critics of Bush's war, hailed the arrest.

"This has lifted a shadow from the people of Iraq," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's main military ally.

In the Arab world, there were mixed feelings, with many ordinary people welcoming the final humiliation of a man who had invaded two of his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, oppressed Iraq's Shi'ite majority and ordered gas attacks on Kurdish villages.

In Kurdish areas, there was wild celebration. But there was virtual silence in his old Sunni Muslim power base of Tikrit.

Some Arabs elsewhere regretted the role the U.S. occupiers played and lamented the passing of a defender of Arab interests. Some Palestinians recalled Saddam's missile strikes on Israel during the 1991 Gulf War as one of his greatest achievements.

The capture of Saddam, the "ace of spades" and number one on the U.S. wanted list, was in stark contrast to the bloody end of his sons Uday and Qusay, who died with guns blazing in July.

Their father kept up a series of taped appeals to his followers after that. But a huge manhunt and a $25 million price on his head must have cramped any role in the guerrilla war. It was unclear if any bounty would be paid for his capture -- U.S. forces paid out $30 million to a man who informed on his sons.

A U.S. official said an Iraqi prisoner provided the initial tip on Saddam. Iraqi officials said Kurdish forces were involved in running him to ground though not involved in the arrest.

It was a humiliating end to a lifelong adventure that began not far away in a poor village on the Tigris just outside Tikrit. Clan connections in the Sunni-dominated military and a taste for ruthless street violence took Saddam to the top of the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party which seized power in a 1968 coup.

He crushed all opposition and lavished huge amounts of Iraq's oil wealth on marble-lined palaces and massive monuments to himself. Many of the former are now barracks for U.S. troops.

The statues were pulled down by joyful Iraqis months ago.

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