BAGHDAD, Dec 16: Iraqi security forces captured Al Qaeda frontman Abu Musab al Zarqawi last year, but released him because they did not know who he was, a senior Iraqi official said on Friday.

“He was arrested more than one year ago in Fallujah by Iraqi police,” deputy interior minister Hussain Kamal said. “It seems they did not recognize him, that’s why they released him.”

The shadowy Jordanian-born Islamist — who only has one leg after being injured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan — is Iraq’s most wanted man and has a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head.

“He is human, he does not have the power of God,” Mr Kamal insisted. “We will bring him to justice.”

Zarqawi, 39, is allegedly the mastermind of numerous bombings, armed attacks, hostage murders and other acts of violence in Iraq, and has been sentenced to death in Jordan for the 2002 murder of a US diplomat.

“He got away once, he will not get away the next time,” Mr Kamal said. “He will be tried for the crimes he committed against the Iraqi people.”

US military forces in Iraq have claimed to have killed or captured a number of Zarqawi’s top operatives and said they have come close to capturing Zarqawi himself on a number of occasions.

“We come close to Zarqawi continuously and at one point in time, in the not too distant future, we are going to get Zarqawi,” Maj Gen Rick Lynch, spokesman for the US-led multinational force in Iraq, said last month.

In Jordan, he was sentenced in 1994 to 15 years in prison for membership in an illegal group and arms possession but later freed under a general amnesty by King Abdullah in May 1999.

He has topped the US most-wanted list in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s downfall in April 2003 and has the same price on his head as Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but has proved elusive despite the huge reward and relentless military pressure.

Unlike Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi has never released a videotaped message and prefers to remain a shadowy figure. Only grainy identity shots, old images from Afghanistan and more recent photos of a portly, grizzled figure give any clue as to his appearance.

Born Fadel Nazzal al Khalayleh in Oct 1966, Zarqawi was a poor student who never graduated from high school. People in his home town of Zarqa remember a hot-headed youth, always armed with a pen-knife and a tattoo on his arm.

He became a radical after being shocked by the social openness that emerged in conservative Jordan with the arrival of tens of thousands of Palestinians who left Kuwait after Iraq invaded the Gulf emirate in 1990.

A veteran of the Afghan war against Soviet occupation, Zarqawi’s encounter with Osama took place in 2000 during visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In late 2001, he was wounded in combat and lost a leg after taking up arms against US-led forces fighting to unseat the Taliban. —AFP