Iraq: US intelligence experts are to examine an audiotape said to contain the voice of Saddam Hussein.
"We don't know whether Saddam Hussein is alive or dead," the White House spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, said yesterday. "Different people have different opinions . . . The tape is going to be analysed."
The tape was obtained by a Sydney Morning Herald reporter, former Irish Times journalist Ed O'Loughlin, said it was handed to him in central Baghdad. On the tape, a male voice urges Iraqis to resist US occupation. The Herald reported that two men gave an audiotape of the appeal allegedly made by Saddam to O'Loughlin after being unable to deliver it to correspondents of an Arab television channel.
"The intelligence community is evaluating the tape," said a US official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The assessment process is ongoing."
He added: "We have no specific evidence that he's alive or he's dead. Basically we are where we were weeks ago."
In the 15-minute recording, purportedly made on Monday, a "tired-sounding" voice calls on Iraqis to unite in an underground war against the US-led occupying forces, the newspaper said.
"We have to go back to the secret style of struggle that we began our life with," the voice is quoted as saying. "Through this secret means, I am talking to you from inside Great Iraq and I say to you, the main task for you, Arab and Kurd, Shia and Sunni, Muslim and Christian and the whole Iraqi people of all religions, your main task is to kick the enemy out from our country."
Meanwhile, US forces in Iraq said they found a trailer used by Saddam Hussein's regime as a mobile biological weapons laboratory.
The announcement was made by Mr Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defence for intelligence, during a Pentagon briefing. Mr Cambone said no actual germ warfare agents have yet been discovered in the lab but added that the trailer would be disassembled and searched extensively for evidence of weapons.
Mr Cambone said a "mobile production facility" painted in a military color scheme came into the hands of US forces on April 19th at a Kurdish checkpoint near the town of Tall Kayf in northern Iraq. The trailer was found on a heavy-equipment transporter typically used for carrying tanks, he added.
Aboard the trailer was equipment that can be used to make biological weapons - living microorganisms used deliberately to spread disease - including a fermenter that could help produce the germ warfare agents, Mr Cambone said.
The US military said yesterday a regional commander of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party on the US list of most-wanted Iraqis was in custody. A statement by US Central Command did not say where Ghazi Hamud al-Adib was taken, if he was caught or turned himself in. - (AFP)