The US-led authority in Iraq said today it was working on burial arrangements for Saddam Hussein's two sons more than a week after they were killed by US troops in the northern city of Mosul.
"Uday and Qusay are still being looked after by the coalition authority," a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority told reporters.
"We are holding very wide consultations with religious leaders, tribal leaders and members of the Governing Council who have given us advice on how to proceed and we have contacted the relevant authorities and are finalising plans for their burial."
Muslim traditions stipulate that the dead must be buried as soon as possible, but the US authorities have said they would hold onto the bodies of Saddam's sons until their relatives came to claim them.
The spokesman said that a number of people in Iraq and abroad had offered to take the bodies. "But we are very aware that we are the foreigners here and we're not in a position to decide who gets these remains," he explained.
The United States does not want the graves of Uday and Qusay to become a shrine for pro-Saddam Iraqis, but the CPA spokesman declined to give details about the negotiations on their burial.
Saddam's dreaded sons were killed in a US raid almost 10 days ago. In a bid to convince Iraqis that they had actually died, the US military published post-mortem pictures and invited a group of journalists to view the bullet-scarred and shrapnel-ridden bodies.