LONDON, April 21: Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is still inside the country, and his son Qusay has been seen over the weekend in the heart of Baghdad, a key Iraqi opposition leader, Ahmad Chalabi, said on Monday.
“Yes, he (Saddam) is in Iraq. Yes, he is moving around,” Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress, said in an interview with BBC radio in Baghdad.
“We have received information about his movements and the movements of his sons,” he said, but added that the information reached Chalabi’s sources too late for them to locate Saddam before he had moved on again.
“We cannot locate Saddam so that we would have a coincidence of time and position simultaneously ... But we are aware of his movements and we are aware of the areas that he has been to and we learn of this within 12 to 24 hours,” Chalabi said.
“We will work to develop more information about his whereabouts,” he said.
Saddam tops the list of 55 Iraqi officials most wanted by the United States, seven of whom have been captured.
Of Saddam’s younger son Qusay, Chalabi said “we received intelligence” on Sunday about his whereabouts, and that he had been seen Saturday in al-Azamiya, a district in central Baghdad.
That is the same neighbourhood where a video tape, purportedly of Saddam amongst a crowd of cheering supporters on April 9 when Baghdad fell to US marines, was recorded.
The tape, shown Friday on Abu Dhabi television, also appeared to show Qusay, 36, who had been the heir apparent to his father’s regime.
Though he is widely seen as the Pentagon’s favourite to lead post-Saddam Iraq, Chalabi told BBC radio’s Today programme that he was not a candidate for the top job.
“No. I am not a candidate for any political position. I don’t want to do a political role now,” said Chalabi, a one-time banker who fled Iraq with his family when he was a young teenager.
“I want to work on building civil society because this is the basis of democracy,” he said.
“Iraqis are not a vanquished people, they think they have won. They are not a people who are conquered, they are a people who feel now victorious.”
Pressed about his potential bid for leadership, Chalabi said: “I don’t want this to be the liberation of Iraq and the enslavement of me.”
On the United Nations, Chalabi said he felt it deserved only a “limited role” in the rebuilding of Iraq. —AFP