Saddam captured

WASHINGTON -- U.S. raiders were not certain at first they had their man when they pulled a bearded man from a hole in a Iraq cellar, but soon were able to determine it was Saddam Hussein. The Associated Press was shown documentary evidence that the person captured is Saddam Hussein.\nThe evidence depicted Saddam as disheveled and wearing a long beard.\nFurther evidence depicted Saddam with his trademark mustache but otherwise clean shaven.\nRep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was telephoned early Sunday by Powell Moore, the deputy secretary of defense for legislative affairs, who told him Saddam had been captured.\n"The capture of Saddam Hussein will clearly take the wind out of the sails of the Baath insurgents," Shelton said. "I think the road to a more stable Iraq is much clearer as a result of this capture."\nOne senior U.S. official said scientific testing, possibly including DNA, was being done early Sunday morning to document Saddam's identity.\nThe official said the captured man did not look like Saddam at first glance.\nThe officials discussing identification methods did so only on condition of anonymity.\nThe military raids in and near Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, were based on fresh intelligence and were aimed at capturing Saddam, the officials said, and the man was captured in one of the targeted buildings.\n"He was in a cellar of the building. His appearance was such that it made it not immediately certain you could say it was Saddam Hussein," one senior U.S. official said.\nBut some marks on the man's body and other information gave the U.S. military its first confirmation they had their target, officials said.\nThe officials said several other people were captured in the raids.\nSaddam's capture will be seen as a defining moment in the Iraq war and subsequent rebuilding process, and Bush administration officials have hoped it would lessen or break the organized resistance against U.S. troops that have led to scores of deaths since the end of combat operations.\nSaddam proved elusive at least twice during the war, when dramatic military strikes came up empty in their efforts to assassinate him. Since then, he has appeared in both video and audio tapes. U.S. officials named him No. 1 on their list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis, the lead card in a special deck of most-wanted cards.\nBut U.S. officials struck a major blow earlier this year when they killed Saddam's two sons during a raid.\nStill, Saddam and his uncanny ability to survive kept him out of U.S. custody for more than six months after the war started. Within hours of the air strike designed to kill at the start of the war in March, Saddam defiantly appeared on television and urged Iraqis to resist the U.S. invasion.\nBut worn by three decades of war and tension, the once-mighty Iraqi army folded quickly and U.S. officials took control of the country quicker than they expected.\nSince then, loyalists led by remnants of Saddam's paramilitary Fedayeen unit have begun operating like insurgent terrorists, using car bombings and grenade attacks to impose casualties.