US troops hunt for clues on fate of Saddam

US troops searched a Baghdad bomb site yesterday for clues on whether Saddam Hussein was killed in an April air strike, and boosted their presence in restive towns seething with hostility towards America.

Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the top US commander in Iraq, said he had ordered a fresh search of a site where US warplanes dropped four 2,000-pound "bunker-buster" bombs on April 7 in a bid to kill Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay.

"You can imagine that if we have an intel lead that possibly there was somebody like Saddam Hussein in that location, we exploit it," he told a news conference. "That's what we're doing."

Dust hung in the air in the upscale Mansur neighbourhood of Baghdad as troops used bulldozers and cranes to haul rubble onto trucks, which took it away for forensic examination.

Soldiers said they had found some bones. Several Iraqis are still missing after the bombing of the area.

"We are meticulously searching the rubble and we have found some skeletal remains," a US private at the site said.

Eight weeks after US forces seized Baghdad, the fate of Saddam remains a mystery.

US planes bombed Mansur after intelligence reports suggested Saddam and his sons were meeting in a building there, but several sightings of Saddam were reported afterwards. Many Iraqis said they saw him near a mosque in northern Baghdad on April 9, the day US forces took the city.

McKiernan said removing the rubble from the bomb site could take two weeks, and the forensic tests may take even longer.

"It's a big hole," he said. "There's a lot of rubble to go through."

General Tommy Franks, who commanded the war against Iraq, said in April that US-led forces had Saddam's DNA and it would be used to check whether attempts to kill him had succeeded.