BAGHDAD, April 27: Some 400 million dollars’ worth of foreign currency was stolen from Iraqi banks in the looting spree that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein, a senior US treasury official said here on Sunday.

The money was mostly in US dollars, euros and pounds sterling, said George Mullinax, the US senior advisor to the Iraqi central bank.

He said another 20 billion Iraqi dinars, equivalent to roughly 10 million dollars, was also stolen.

David Nummy, another US treasury official, said cash payments to Iraqi civil servants had begun several days ago, starting with the railways, and that the employees were being paid 20 dollars each in a one-off payment.

The payment is aimed at giving them purchasing power to help stimulate the economy, Nummy said, and was coming from Iraqi funds frozen in the United States under a United States law aimed at fighting terrorism.

He said the civil servants would still be paid their normal monthly salaries in Iraqi dinars for the months of March and April.

Nummy estimated the number of civil servants at between 1 and 2.5 million.

He also said senior officials in the different Iraqi ministries have saved copies of payrolls on computer files and this would facilitate the resumption of work.

Mullinax recalled that US troops had already found $650 million in one of Saddam’s presidential palaces—AFP