BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 -- A lieutenant of Iraq's most feared insurgent leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was captured this week, the country's national security minister said Thursday, and U.S. forces unearthed the largest cache of weapons yet -- ranging from grenades to parts of missile batteries -- in the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
State Minister Qasim Dawood identified the Zarqawi aide as Abu Saeed and said he had been arrested two days before in the northern city of Mosul, where insurgents staged an uprising this month and virtually all the city's 4,000 police officers fled. U.S. military officials say they believe Zarqawi may have fled to northern Iraq, perhaps to Mosul, after American forces this month retook Fallujah, which he and his men used as a base.
British soldiers detain suspects during a military operation in a village on the east bank of the Euphrates, in the restive region of Iraq south of Baghdad.
(Pool Photo/Michael Dunlea -- The Daily Mail Via Reuters)
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Dawood provided no details on the aide or his arrest, and a U.S. military spokesman said he was not aware of the detention. Zarqawi, a Jordanian guerrilla, has asserted responsibility for devastating bombings and the beheadings of foreign hostages, which have chilled Iraqis and reportedly eroded his support among other insurgent leaders.
In Fallujah, a city in western Iraq that had been under the control of insurgents since April and was devastated by the U.S. assault more than two weeks ago, Marines and Iraqi forces discovered a sprawling stockpile of weapons, many in a mosque once frequented by Abdullah Janabi, a cleric and militant leader who sometimes preached there and who eluded the attack.
In and around the mosque was an arsenal: small arms, artillery shells, heavy machine guns and antitank mines. In other buildings within the compound, which was surrounded by a 10-foot-high concrete wall, were mortar systems, rocket-propelled grenades, recoilless rifles and parts of surface-to-air weapons systems, the Marines said.
The Marine statement said documents were found inside the worship hall that detailed interrogations of kidnap victims believed to be held in Fallujah.
At a news conference, Dawood said that elsewhere in Fallujah manuals had been found that provided instructions for making bombs and possibly anthrax, a deadly biological agent. The U.S. military had no comment on the claim, and the minister offered no evidence.
A day after an American diplomat was killed near Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, questions lingered about his death.
Jim Mollen, 48, the U.S. Embassy's senior consultant to the Iraqi ministers of education and higher education, was the second U.S. diplomat known to have been killed in Baghdad since Iraq's interim government assumed political power on June 28. Pete Mitchell, an embassy spokesman, said Mollen's body was discovered Wednesday afternoon in a sport-utility vehicle outside the zone in central Baghdad that houses the U.S. Embassy and Iraqi government offices.
A senior diplomat in Baghdad said Mollen was driving alone in the car, which was not armored, in violation of rules for U.S. government employees here. Another diplomat said Mollen may have been abducted within the fortified compound.
"We think there is a possibility he may have been held up in a type of criminal action and taken outside the Green Zone area," the diplomat said. "We're investigating all the possibilities, and that is just one possibility."
Muhanned Hanoun, a spokesman for the Education Ministry, said Mollen routinely visited the ministry without guards and was highly regarded by employees there.
"The day before yesterday, he came to the ministry, and I asked him: 'Why don't you use guards to protect yourself? It is dangerous outside.' He said: 'I came here to serve Iraqis. I am here to help them and they know that. They won't hurt me.' "
The organization led by Zarqawi said on Thursday that it had carried out the attack that killed Mollen, according to the Reuters news service, which said the claim appeared on Internet sites often used by radical Islamic groups in Iraq, but could not be verified.
