A former top official of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, and cousin of the deposed leader, surrendered to US forces in Baghdad today.
Gen Kamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan al-Tikriti, the No 10 on the American "Iraqi Top 55 list," gave himself up this morning, US Central Command said in a statement issued from MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
Mustafa spent almost his entire career in the Republican Guard. His brother is married to Saddam's youngest daughter, Hala. He was No 52 on the US list of "most wanted" figures from the ousted regime.
Sultan was the second "Top 55" official to be taken into custody in recent days. On Thursday, Adilabdillah Mahdi al-Duri al-Tikriti, Baath Party regional command chairman for the Dhi Qar district near Tikrit, was taken into custody, the military said.
Meanwhile, the US is pushing for a vote on a UN resolution that will help rebuild the country, with Russia, China and France making it clear they want major changes in the US-backed resolution.
In Moscow, Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov, Russia's diplomatic point man on Iraq, said he believed that despite questions raised by the resolution, sponsored jointly by the US, Britain and Spain, it was possible to reach an acceptable solution.
Fedotov told the ITAR-Tass news agency that the resolution raised questions about "the mandate of temporary occupational forces and their authorities" and also on the process of lifting international sanctions against Iraq.
In Deauville, France, US Treasury secretary John Snow sought today to expand international efforts to determine the size of Iraq's huge debts - estimated in the tens of billions of US dollars - at a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of Eight nations at this Normandy coast resort.
The Paris Club of 19 creditor nations, which includes the US, is already studying the extent of Iraqi debts. But Washington wants to survey countries that are members of that group to find out how much Iraq owes them, according to a US official.
Russia and France have called for UN sanctions to be suspended - not lifted - and for UN weapons inspectors to certify that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated, as called for in the Security Council resolution imposing the punitive measures.
The inspection issue is not addressed in the draft resolution.
The alleged presence in Iraq of vast quantities of banned chemical and biological and the imminent danger that some might be transferred to terrorist groups was cited by Washington and London the main reason for the attack on Iraq. Despite extensive efforts, no trace of those weapons has been discovered. AP