Saddam's half brother captured in Iraq
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-02-27 20:03

Saddam Hussein's half-brother has been captured, Iraq's government said on Sunday, the first senior Baath Party member to be detained in a year.

Sabawi Ibrahim Hasan, a half brother of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, shown in this Department of Defense playing card, has been captured, officials in the prime minister's office said Sunday Feb. 27, 2005. [AP]

Several months ago Iraqi government officials said Ibrahim was one of at least two former Baath Party members directing the anti-American insurgency from neighboring Syria.

In a statement confirming Sabawi's capture, the interim government said it would seize "all criminals who committed massacres and those who have their hands stained with the blood of the Iraqi people," and deliver them to justice.

Ibrahim, who had a $1 million bounty on his head, is the first person on the list to be detained since February 2004, when number 41, Muhammad Zimam al-Sadun, was taken into custody.

Nearly a dozen of the 55 remain at large, including Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam's top aides, who is number six.

Details of the arrest and its circumstances were expected to be announced at a news conference later on Sunday.

Ibrahim's brothers Watban and Barzan -- numbers 37 and 38 in a U.S. pack of cards -- were seized in April 2003 and are being held at a U.S. military facility on the outskirts of Baghdad.

They are due to be tried in the coming months, part of a group of 12, including Saddam, who will be the first people to go before the country's special tribunal.

Ibrahim's capture follows a series of arrests of senior members of the insurgency in recent weeks, both members of the former regime and Sunni Muslim fighters.

On Friday, the government announced the capture of a man called Abu Qutaybah, described as a key lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is al Qaeda's leader in Iraq and has been behind some of the country's bloodiest attacks.

Another man, Abu Uthman, was seized with Abu Qutaybah. The government said he arranged meetings for Zarqawi and occasionally acted as his driver.

JOURNALISTS TARGETED

Despite the apparent inroads made against an insurgency that has gripped the country for nearly two years, daily suicide bomb blasts, ambushes and targeted killings persist.

A bomb exploded at a local government building in a town near the northern city of Mosul on Sunday, killing at least five people and wounding four, 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.

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

That incident follows several targeted killings of journalists over the past two weeks.

The body of a female news presenter, kidnapped in Mosul a week ago as she was driving with her 10-year-old daughter, was discovered dumped by a road on Saturday, neighbors of the family said. Her daughter had earlier been freed.

Another journalist working for Alhurra in the southern city of Basra was killed as he drove to work with his son earlier this month.

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, a doctor and former exile who is the candidate of the religious Shi'ite alliance that won the election, and Iyad Allawi, the current prime minister.

Both the Shi'ite alliance, whose election victory secured it 140 seats in the 275-seat parliament, and Allawi's secular coalition, which came third in the vote winning 40 seats, need the support of the second-placed Kurds to form a government.

The Kurds, who will have 75 seats in the national assembly, have given no indication who they will back.

They are expected to use their kingmaker role to extract demands for Kurdish autonomy and other issues. There is no time limit for the formation of the government.

Once it is formed, and Western diplomats believe it could be weeks longer, its main task will be organizing the drafting of a new constitution under which Iraq is due to hold another election before mid-December this year.