BAGHDAD, April 12: Residents of a Baghdad suburb said on Saturday they saw Saddam Hussein’s younger son Qusay alive shortly after US bombs flattened a building where US officials had tried to kill Saddam and his sons.

On Monday a B-1 bomber dropped four 900-kg bombs on the building in the Mansur district after the CIA received a tip that Saddam and sons Qusay and Uday were inside.

The strike demolished the building but US and British officials said they suspected Saddam might have got away.

This correspondent visited the upscale Mansur district on Saturday, the first time an unsupervised visit had been possible since censorship collapsed with Saddam’s rule. Only on Saturday morning did “foreign Arab fighters” who had continued to resist US forces pull out of the area.

Among people living across the street from the bombed building, one middle-aged couple said they both saw Qusay, Saddam’s heir apparent, driven away in a government-issue Peugeot 306 car about 15 minutes after the bombing.

The couple, who had seen Qusay in the flesh before, said they had rushed out of their villa after the blast to inspect damage. Their garden remained littered with rubble.

They said Qusay was sitting in the passenger seat of the car.—Reuters