Residents of a Baghdad suburb said today 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 2,000-pound (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.
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.
They 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 with an AK-47 rifle in his lap. They were sure it was him, they said, because they had seen him before in the flesh.
The whole street had been swarming with Saddam's special security guards before the explosions, they said.
The husband, speaking on condition of anonymity, said some of his relatives believed they had seen Saddam himself at around the same time a few streets away.
There was no way of independently corroborating the statements and Saddam is known to have a number of lookalikes to help protect against possible assassination attempts.
US intelligence officials sounded confident that they had at least been close to hitting Saddam.
The area was known to have been frequented by Saddam and other members of the Iraqi elite.