WASHINGTON, June 9: Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi briefly survived a US air strike and was conscious enough to try to roll off a gurney and get away after US forces arrived on the scene, a US general said on Friday.
Major General William Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said the Jordanian militant died a short time later of wounds suffered when two 227-kg bombs destroyed the house he was in near the city of Baquba on Wednesday.
Five other people — two men and three women — also were killed in the attack, he said.
Iraqi police, the first to arrive on the scene, pulled the bloodied Zarqawi from the rubble of the building onto a gurney-like stretcher, Gen Caldwell told reporters here in a video press conference from Baghdad.
US forces, arriving soon after, immediately went to Zarqawi and found him alive when they examined him, according to Gen Caldwell.
Western forces at the site reported that ‘he mumbled a little something but it was indistinguishable and it was very short’, he said.
Gen Caldwell told Fox News in a separate interview that Zarqawi ‘was conscious initially, according to the US forces that physically saw him’.
“He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realising it was the US military,” he said.
Gen Caldwell, who said he was briefed on Friday morning on what happened, gave a similar account to reporters at the Pentagon.
“According to the person on the ground, Zarqawi attempted to sort of turn away off the stretcher. Everybody resecured him on the stretcher, but he died immediately thereafter,” the general said. Gen Caldwell did not know how long Zarqawi survived the blast. He said the military is trying to reconstruct the timeline between the bombing, the Iraqi police’s arrival on the scene, the arrival of the US forces and Zarqawi’s death.
US military officials said on Thursday that Zarqawi was killed in the air strike.
Gen Caldwell attributed the discrepancy to inaccuracies in initial reports that became clearer with fuller after-action debriefings.
But it raised the question of how Zarqawi could have survived the blast of two 227-kg bombs.
“That’s the exact same question I asked today when I sat down with several air force officers, to include some that were associated with the whole operation,” the general said.
“And they assured me that there are cases when people, in fact, can survive even an attack like that on a building structure. Obviously, the other five in the building did not, but he did for some reason,” he said.
“And we do not know — and I’ve looked through the report — as to whether or not it was because he might have been right outside or whatever. We just don’t have that granularity,” he said.
Gen Caldwell said there was nothing in the reports he had seen to indicate that Zarqawi had been shot or died of wounds other than those received in the blast.
The US troops recognised the man on the stretcher as Zarqawi and were able to identify him from distinguishing marks on his body, he said.
Zarqawi’s face was ‘very, very bloodied’, he said.
“And we made a conscious decision that if we were going to take photographs of him and make them available publicly like we did in the press conference that we were going to clean him up,” he said.
“Despite the fact that this person actually had no regard for human life, we were not going to treat him in the same manner. And so, they did clean his face up for the shots that were shown publicly.”
He said the US military has control of Zarqawi’s body and is consulting the Iraqi government on what to do with it.
Zarqawi and Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman, the Al-Qaeda leader’s ‘spiritual adviser’, were the only two bodies identified so far, he said.
Their identities were confirmed through fingerprints. Results of DNA tests have not yet come back, he said. —AFP
