WASHINGTON, April 9: US military officials told reporters on Wednesday that President Saddam Hussein might have escaped the air strike meant to kill him along with one of his sons and top aides.

They said British intelligence officials also had told the CIA that the Iraqi leader had left the house where he was meeting his top aides before a US plane bombed it.

On Monday afternoon, a US B-1B bomber dropped four laser-guided “bunker-busters” on this house in Baghdad’s Al Mansour neighbourhood, targeting President Saddam Hussein and other senior Iraqi leaders.

Pentagon officials said the strike followed a tip from an unidentified Iraqi that President Saddam, his son Qusay and other members of the ruling Baath Party were meeting in a fortified bunker beneath the main building.

The huge blasts left a smoking crater 60 feet deep and flattened at least three houses. About 20 other houses were damaged, some of them badly, by the explosions, which broke windows and doors up to 300 yards away, ripped orange trees out by the roots, hurled steel beams 100 yards and left a heap of broken concrete, mangled iron rods and shredded furniture and clothes.

Witnesses said that nine Iraqis were killed in the initial strike and that four others were wounded. Iraqi rescue workers pulled three bodies from the wreckage on Tuesday — those of a boy, a young woman and an elderly man.

President Bush, in response to a question at a news conference after his summit with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Northern Ireland, said it was unclear whether President Saddam was dead or alive.

“I don’t know whether he survived,” Mr Bush said. “The only thing I know is that he’s losing power.”

US intelligence experts monitoring electronic communications among the Iraqi leaders had not intercepted anything to suggest that President Saddam was dead, officials said.

They said analysts heard Qusay Hussein’s name invoked in some communications, but they indicated that the calls did not make it clear whether President Saddam’s younger son was dead or alive.

Several newspapers, quoting intelligence sources, reported that British MI6 had told the CIA that it believed President Saddam left the building moments before the US bombs fell.

“We think he left the same way he arrived in the area, either by a tunnel system or by car, we’re not sure,” a British intelligence source was quoted as saying in Wednesday’s newspapers.

Brig-Gen Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations for Central Command forward headquarters, however, indicated that it would take time, and perhaps detailed forensic work, to establish who was killed.

But officials in Washington said the investigation could be hampered because US officials did not have any of President Saddam Hussein’s DNA. If body parts are recovered, DNA samples obtained from close relatives of President Saddam could be used to establish the likelihood that the remains were those of the president. But such evidence would not be conclusive.