PARIS, July 23: A journalist preparing a story on Saddam Hussein and his two sons Uday and Qusay for the French national news weekly magazine Le Point says that Uday was in the process of negotiating his surrender to the US occupation authority when he was killed on Tuesday.

According to Jean Guisnel, who is considered an authority on the Saddam family and Iraq and who was speaking to a reporter for French public TV channel France 3 on Wednesday, “Uday was in the process of negotiating his surrender because he had let it be known that he would prefer being handed over alive to US forces than being discovered by Iraqi nationals whom he feared might lynch him instead of turning him over to US authorities.”

Although Mr Guisnel would not divulge the source of his information, he has often based his stories on Iraq on French intelligence sources.