8 Al Qaeda suspects killed in US raid in Iraq

BAGHDAD -- US and Iraqi forces, acting on a tip about an Al Qaeda cell, stormed a house in a middle-class neighborhood of Mosul and, after a six-hour clash, all eight people inside were found dead, including three who had killed themselves with vest bombs, a police general said yesterday. Four Iraqi police also were killed.

Authorities were trying to determine if any of those killed was Iraq's leading terrorism suspect, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

In Washington, US officials said that they had no indication that Zarqawi had been killed or captured, and that efforts to identify the dead had been inconclusive as of last night. Officials said fingerprints, DNA, and other forensic evidence would be compared with similar identifiers, including Zarqawi's, in US intelligence databases.

The Pentagon had received no information suggesting that Zarqawi had been killed or even targeted in a US military operation, according to the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita.

''I just have no reason to believe that any of these reports we are getting are accurate," Di Rita said last night. He said reports about a Zarqawi capture have been erroneous in the past.

Zarqawi, a Jordanian blamed for a long string of bloody attacks against Western and Iraqi targets, most recently three almost simultaneous suicide bombings at hotels in Jordan this month, has been the target of a massive hunt inside Iraq.

A Jordanian national who fought in Afghanistan, Zarqawi had established a fundamentalist Islamic enclave in northern Iraq before the US invasion. In the months after US forces arrived, he emerged as the leader of Islamist resistance to the US presence.

Zarqawi has eluded US forces for more than two years, despite a $25 million reward offered by US officials for information leading to his death or capture.

After Saturday's gun battle, the governor of Nineveh, Duraid Kishmoula, told some reporters in Mosul that Zarqawi was believed to have been inside the house. He later retracted that statement.

But speculation that Zarqawi himself might have been killed began circulating with a report in at least one Arabic-language website.

The firefight took place in the Hay al Sokkar neighborhood of northeast Mosul. Alaa Zeyor, who lives on the street behind the house, told the Los Angeles Times that the property had been vacant for about five months with a for-rent sign outside.

Sometime in the past two weeks, someone had moved in, she said, noting that her brother had seen a woman and a child there. But in all respects, the house seemed normal, she said.

According to Zeyor, Iraqi police and US troops cordoned off the house at 9 a.m. Saturday, sparking a ferocious battle that lasted until 3 p.m., when explosions shook the house and collapsed several sections of its brick walls.

Some Mosul residents said the intensity of the assault reminded them of the raid on a house in another part of the city that ended in the deaths of former president Saddam Hussein's two sons, Odai and Qusai.

The house was still blockaded by police yesterday, but a correspondent in Mosul saw through the broken walls into the kitchen. There was blood on the ground, and shell casings from what appeared to be heavy machine guns.

Police charged that it had been a terrorist hideout and said the fighting had left four Iraqi police dead.

''We received reports about a house in the Sokkar area that had some terrorists inside, and they had a lot of ammunition," said Brigadier Sayeed Ahmad of the Iraqi police. ''So we went to the place and asked residents to evacuate the street and the nearby houses."

From the start, he said, the armed group inside refused to come out and launched fierce resistance, which lasted for hours, ''until they used up all their ammunition. Then, three of the men blew themselves up inside the house with explosives on their bodies, and that destroyed most of the building," he said.

When the battle ended, he said, US and Iraqi troops dug through the remains of the house and pulled out eight bodies, one of which was a woman's. She had written a note pinned to her dress, saying in Arabic that she was ''istishhadia," a seeker of martyrdom, the police brigadier said.

Elsewhere in Iraq, US officials said that a Marine of the 2nd Marine Division died yesterday of gun wounds he had received Saturday in the town of Karmah.

Another Marine was killed in a roadside bomb explosion that also killed 15 civilians, and that sparked a battle that killed eight insurgents in Haditha, the US authorities said.

In Basra, southern Iraq, a bomb killed a British soldier and wounded four. He was the 98th Briton to have died in the war.

In Baghdad yesterday, about 400 Sunnis demanded an end to the torture of detainees.

They also called on the international community to pressure Iraqi and US authorities to ensure that such abuse does not occur.

Anger over abuse has increased since US troops found 173 detainees at a prison in Baghdad.

Some detainees, mainly Sunnis, appeared to have borne torture marks on their bodies after they were released.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.