IRAQ: The US military has denied reports that Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the most wanted man in Iraq after Saddam Hussein and the alleged mastermind of guerrilla resistance, had been captured in a raid yesterday.
It said 27 suspected guerrillas were caught when up to 1,000 soldiers stormed into the small town of Hawija near the northern city of Kirkuk before dawn, but the man with a $10 million price on his head was not one of them.Earlier, sources in Iraq's Governing Council had said Ibrahim had been either seized or killed.
Meanwhile another US soldier has died, killed by a roadside bomb near the tense town of Samarra on Tuesday, the 189th to die in fighting since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1st.
Kirkuk's police chief, speaking as the Hawija raid went on late into the day, had not given up hope Ibrahim had been found.
"The possibility we have Izzat Ibrahim is more than 80 per cent, but I can't say for sure whether he has been killed or captured yet," Torhan Abulrahman said. He said US forces and Iraqi police had mounted the joint sweep after information from one of Ibrahim's wives, captured earlier this month, suggested he was in the area.
Ibrahim's detention would have been a major coup for the US-led coalition. A veteran political ally of Saddam, he is sixth on the US list of top Iraqi fugitives; all in the top five except for Saddam have been killed or captured.
In Britain, meanwhile, anti-terror police yesterday arrested 14 people in central and southern England and said they had charged a man under the Terrorism Act. Four were held in London, six in the university city of Cambridge and four near Birmingham in the West Midlands. Police said the operations were not connected.
Mr Noureddinne Mouleff (36) was arrested in Eastbourne last week. He will appear before magistrates in London today charged under section 57 of the Terrorism Act. Section 57 deals with suspects found with "an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that its possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism".
The four arrested in London were men seized in a series of pre-dawn raids in the south-west of the city. Sources said the arrests were linked to international terrorism but were unlikely to prove as significant as that in Gloucester.
At his monthly news conference yesterday, the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, repeated his warning that Britons were under threat and urged vigilance.
"There is no doubt there is a threat because these people are operating in most parts of world and they have no compunction about taking the lives of innocent people," he said.