BAGHDAD, April 20: Saddam Hussein’s entourage hid out in the home of a former family bodyguard for much of the US-led air war, leaving only when a bunker-busting bomb meant for the Iraqi leader struck a block away, residents told the Associated Press on Sunday.

The accounts heightened the possibility that Saddam survived the April 7 attack.

Neighbours said they believed Saddam himself had stayed in the house in the well-off western Baghdad block, though none of those interviewed claimed to have seen the Iraqi leader himself.

However, Saddam’s top bodyguard, Ali Nassir, and the leader’s cousin Gen. Ali Suleyman Abdullah al-Majid were among those seen coming and going for about 10 days. Nassir and others guarded the house until all inside fled in the hours after the US bombing on the afternoon of April 7.

“They came out in civilian clothes, in groups, and you could see the fear on their faces,” said Osama al-Bidely, next-door neighbour to the high-walled compound. “They left their guns, they left their uniforms, and they left like civilians.”

The home’s owner, a woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Baath Party officials barred her from the house during the time they were there and told her to destroy a discarded two-star general’s uniform she found when she moved back in.

“I asked what to do with it. They said, ‘Burn it.”

In the last hours of the US entry into Baghdad, the United States unleashed bunker bombs that blew a crater 60 feet deep into a street of the al-Mansour neighbourhood. The bombs blew at least three houses and 14 people into barely discernible bits.

US authorities said at the time it would take digging and forensic work to determine if Saddam had been inside.

The targeted houses had been on one block behind the neighbourhood’s ornate United Arab Emirates Embassy. Just a block away, on the other side of the embassy: the house where neighbours say Saddam’s camp took refuge.

The neighbourhood housed intelligence officials and other ranking members of Saddam’s regime, al-Bidery and neighbour Falhel al-Zaidi said.

According to residents, the house in question originally had been given by Saddam to one of his favourite bodyguards - an operative slain by Saddam’s eldest son in a notorious case that highlighted Odai Hussein’s brutality.

Al-Zaidi and al-Bidery said the current homeowner worked in intelligence for Odai. She denied working in any way for Saddam’s son, saying she ran a tourism business.

An ornate two-story limestone structure with arches looping on top, the house at times had been rented by ambassadors of Libya and Algeria, the woman and other neighbours said.

The homeowner said she and her family had fled Baghdad in advance of US bombs. When family members changed their minds and returned, they found the house taken over. Baath party officials had changed the locks and told the family it could not move back in.

Neighbours up and down the block spoke of the top military officials they said had moved into the residence, saying the high-ranking squatters barred neighbours from approaching the house.—APP