Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was alive and made a move to escape when US troops reached the supposed leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, mortally wounded in an bombing raid, a US general claimed today.
The attack that killed Zarqawi and his spiritual adviser, Sheik Abdul-Rahman, yielded valuable information for several subsequent raids in Iraq, Major General William Caldwell, the spokesman for the US military in Baghdad said.
"We were not aware yesterday that in fact, Zarqawi was alive when US forces arrived on the site," the General said.
Rubble and debris litter the site of the safe house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed.
Iraqi police first reached the bombed safe house in a village north of Baghdad and put Zarqawi on a stretcher, he said.
US ground forces then arrived and identified Zarqawi, who died shortly afterward.
"He was conscious initially, according to the US forces that physically saw him. He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realizing it was US military," General Caldwell said.
Zarqawi gave up no information before he died, but the attack has yielded unprecedented intelligence about his network, the General said.
"We had two of the most prominent figures from the al-Qaeda network in Iraq here on site in that location ... anything they had we now have in coalition forces' possession and in fact are exploiting it."
He said a series of US military raids based on intelligence gathered from the destroyed hideout of al-Zarqawi have yielded at least two dozen captives and a hidden cache of weaponry, Iraqi army uniforms and other materials.
General Caldwell said no single tip led US and Iraqi forces to the village of Hibhib. "It wasn't like somebody said 'at that house at this time, you will find Zarqawi.' That did not occur," he said.
He said there were 17 raids in Iraq shortly after the attack, some made possible by intelligence gained in it.
The intelligence also helped support some of an additional 39 raids last night. There were six people in house at the time of the attack, three women and three men, he said at a Pentagon briefing later on Friday. There were no survivors.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki today imposed a ban on all vehicle traffic today in Baghdad and the volatile Diyala province.
The ban is an apparent effort to prevent reprisal attacks by suicide car bombers following the death of al-Zarqawi.
The ban, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad and in the town of Baquba, near where US planes killed Zarqawi on Wednesday, will last for four hours until Iraqis go to mosques for Friday prayers, the Interior Ministry said .
The killing of al-Zarqawi is a "new beginning" for Iraq, the interior minister said today.
Suicide car bombers launched by Zarqawi have attacked Shia mosques in the past as part of a campaign to plunge Iraq into sectarian civil war. The traffic ban suggested authorities feared more such attacks.
In Afghanistan, fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar vowed that the killing of Zarqawi would not weaken Muslim efforts against "crusader forces", a Pakistani report said.
Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani told Iraqiya state television: "Killing Zarqawi is a new beginning for Iraqi security and establishing peace between the different components of society."
But US officials, struggling to defeat an insurgency in Iraq over the three years since the US invasion, have warned against expectations of an quick end to violence.