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Kurdish fighters nab Saddam's former VP

Gaida Ali, 13, recovers at the Italian Red Cross hospital in Baghdad. Ali lost one eye after some an unidentified assailant shot her while she was going to buy bread for her family. PHOTO: AP PHOTO

Taha Yassin Ramadan, former vice president of Iraq and one of Saddam Hussein's closest allies, was in US custody yesterday after being captured by Kurdish fighters and handed over to US troops.

The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) said it had tracked down Ramadan in Mosul -- the same city Saddam's feared sons Uday and Qusay were hiding in when US troops killed them last month.

The PUK is one of two Kurdish groups in northern Iraq whose forces fought alongside US soldiers in the war to topple Saddam.

The Pentagon confirmed that Ramadan, number 20 on a US list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis, had been captured. Washington says 38 of the people on the list have now been captured or killed. But Saddam himself remains on the run.

Ramadan, one of the most hawkish members of Saddam's inner circle, has been accused of crimes against humanity for his role in suppressing a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq in the 1980s and a Shiite revolt in the south in 1991.

The US military says supporters of Saddam, and some foreign militants, are behind a guerrilla campaign that has killed 61 US soldiers since the start of May.

In the latest ambush, a rocket-propelled grenade and gun attack on a US convoy north of Baghdad wounded two American soldiers early yesterday, the US military said.

Lieutenant Colonel William MacDonald of the 4th Infantry Division said the convoy was attacked near Balad, a town in the "Sunni Triangle" where support for Saddam remains strong.

At least seven Iraqis were killed on Monday in a blast at an ammunition dump north of Saddam's home town of Tikrit. MacDonald said US troops investigating the blast found one body at the scene and Iraqi police later found a further six.

The identities of those killed were not known, but soldiers said the ammunition dump had been often targeted by looters.

In Ramadi, another Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad, witnesses said that an American convoy was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades yesterday morning and at least one soldier was wounded.

A US Army spokesman had no immediate information.

Meanwhile, UN special representative for Iraq Sergio Vieira de Mello was wounded in a truck bomb attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad yesterday, UN officials in New York said.

Fred Eckhard, a spokesman for the world body, said he could not specify whether Vieira de Mello had been seriously injured.

The UN envoy was in his office at the time of the blast and was attended to by rescue workers. He retained consciousness and was able to drink a glass of water, a UN official in New York noted on condition of anonymity.

UN spokeswoman Veronique Taveau said in Baghdad that several people were injured in the huge explosion that rocked the building in the Iraqi capital.

Benon Sevan, director of the UN oil-for-food program in Iraq, was also among those injured, according to Taveau.

On Sunday, award-winning Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana, a Palestinian, was shot dead by a US soldier while filming outside a prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad. The US military said the shooting was a "tragic accident."
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