Iraqi States Hussein Is Alive, Offering Bounties on Troops
NEW YORK — Ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been seen north of Baghdad and is paying a bounty for every American soldier killed, the leader of an Iraqi exile group said Tuesday.
Hussein has $1.3 billion in cash taken from the Central Bank on March 18, is bent on revenge and believes that he can “sit it out,†said Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said Tuesday that they had no information that would support the claims.
The ousted Iraqi leader has been sighted several times recently, moving in an arc from the Diyala region northeast of Baghdad, around the Tigris River toward his hometown of Tikrit and into areas west of the Tigris, Chalabi said.
He said the latest sighting was about two weeks before Chalabi left on his current trip to the United States.
“He will pay bounty for every American soldier killed in Iraq now. This has been spread around in the western part of the country,†Chalabi told the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in New York.
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