WASHINGTON, Aug 21: A former Iraqi defence minister known as “Chemical Ali” for leading poisonous gas attacks on Kurds has been captured, US officials said on Thursday.

The US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, announced that Ali Hassan Al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein who was No. 5 on America’s most-wanted list, was in custody.

Al-Majid led the 1988 campaign against rebels in northern Iraq in which thousands of Kurds were killed, many of them in chemical attacks.

A first cousin of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Al-Majid was a warrant officer delivering messages on motorcycles. But he rose to become defence minister from 1991-95.

Pentagon officials told reporters in Washington that Al-Majid was captured earlier this week, but did not say where or how he was captured.

Al-Majid is also blamed for ruthlessly suppressing uprisings against Saddam and for widespread human rights violations during the seven-month Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91 when he was appointed governor of the captured territory.

US officials at first thought that Al-Majid was killed in April in an airstrike on a house in southern Iraq, near Basra. But Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in June that interrogations of Iraqi prisoners indicated that he might be alive.

He earned the nickname “Chemical Ali” after he ordered the use of chemical weapons to quell a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq. In a single attack, some 5,000 men, women and children were reportedly killed in Halabja in March 1988 when government forces bombed and shelled the town with gas.

News of Majid’s reported detention came on the heels of the arrest this week of former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.