BAGHDAD – It appears there was only one body, only one senior al-Qaida leader killed in action this week by U.S. forces in a shootout.

But Iraqi forces twice intercepted the corpse of the dead man after it had been released for burial by the U.S. military, prompting a flurry of claims by Iraqi security forces that they had killed the organization’s top leaders and illustrating the difficulty of ascertaining facts amid the confusion that often surrounds the Iraq war.

According to the U.S. military, Muharib Abdul-Latif al-Jubouri was shot dead by U.S. forces early Tuesday on a mission code-named Operation Rat Trap, in a location just west of Taiji and northwest of Baghdad shortly after 2 a.m. Tuesday.

U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell identified al-Jubouri as the Minister of Information in the al-Qaida-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq, which is headed by the overall head of al-Qaida-affiliated groups in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

Caldwell said al-Jubouri was suspected of having played a role in the kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll in January 2006, the murder of U.S. hostage Tom Fox of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in March 2006. The general also said al-Jubouri was involved in financing and logistics for foreign fighters entering Iraq.

Al-Jubouri’s body was brought to Baghdad for DNA testing and, after it had been positively identified, was released to a relative for burial Wednesday.

As the relative drove through Baghdad with the body, he was stopped at a checkpoint by Iraqi police, who took the body into custody and handed it over to U.S. forces. “They recognized that he was somebody on some kind of wanted list,” Caldwell said.

The U.S. military released the body again. This time, it found its way to a mosque in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliyah, where it was laid out for mourning in accordance with Muslim tradition.

An alert local resident tipped off Iraqi security forces that the body of a senior al-Qaida leader, believed to be al-Baghdadi, was in the mosque.

Iraqi security forces stormed the mosque and seized the body.

As Caldwell was briefing journalists on the U.S. operation Thursday afternoon, Iraq’s Interior Ministry spokesman, Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, held a news conference to announce that Iraqi security forces had killed al-Baghdadi during an operation in Ghazaliyah, producing pictures of a bloated corpse to support the claim.

Later, Khalaf appeared on Iraqi state television and stated that al-Jubouri was the same man as al-Baghdadi, but this time he said he had died of injuries received during an operation launched by Iraqi security forces in Salahuddin province several weeks earlier.

U.S. military officials said they had no reason to believe al-Baghdadi and al-Jubouri are the same man, though Caldwell said U.S. forces aren’t certain who al-Baghdadi is.

Caldwell disputed suggestions that the incident suggested poor coordination between U.S. and Iraqi forces and said the incident instead demonstrated that Iraqi security forces are doing their job.

“I’m not sure there was a real need to per se notify somebody that there’s a dead person being transported from point A to point B,” he said.

Rather, he said, the Iraqi security forces who intercepted the body showed that they were “alert, they were attentive, they were paying attention.”


“It speaks volumes for the professionalization, the growth and the development of the Iraqi security forces,” he said.

“There’s a lot of people within the city that are moved around that have been deceased that the Iraqi security forces probably see in different vehicles, but they were able to identify this one. So that is a good thing that that happened.”


But the incident also demonstrated the difficulty of obtaining reliable information from an Iraqi government that is desperate to demonstrate results in the battle against terrorism to its increasingly frustrated Shiite constituents, who are the main targets of al-Qaida’s bombing campaigns.

The Islamic State of Iraq issued a statement on its Web site offering a version of events that closely matched the U.S. military’s, confirming al-Jubouri’s death and denying al-Baghdadi’s. “Today we tell the nation the happy news that one of our emirs is martyred,” said the statement, naming al-Jubouri and describing a shootout that occurred west of Taiji in the small hours of Tuesday morning.

“Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is fine and still fighting the enemy for the sake of God,” the statement added. The group had also earlier denied that Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been killed.

Caldwell described al-Jubouri as a leading propagandist for al-Qaida operations and said he lived in Syria between May and September last year, helping foreign fighters cross the border into Iraq.

He played a part in helping move Carroll around while she was a hostage, Caldwell said, though the Christian Science Monitor reported that Carroll did not recognize his picture. Caldwell also said al-Jubouri was believed to be the last person seen in the company of Fox, whose body was found dumped on a Baghdad street four months after he had been abducted.

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(Chicago Tribune correspondent Nadeem Majeed contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2007, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-05-03-07 1925EDT