U.S. captures No. 5; blast toll rises to 23

U.S. officials gave no details as to how 'Chemical Ali' was captured.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Searchers pulled three more bodies from the rubble of the bombed U.N. headquarters in Baghdad today, raising the death toll to 23. Also, the U.S. military said it captured Ali Hassan al-Majid, No. 5 on the list of most-wanted Iraqis.
Later, the United Nations announced it was withdrawing one-third of its staff from Iraq.
Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein's, once ran Iraq's armed forces. Opponents dubbed him "Chemical Ali" for his role in 1988 chemical weapons attacks that killed thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq.
Earlier, U.S. troops nabbed a suspected Iraqi militia leader carrying what appeared to be a hit list of 10 Iraqi names. And an American soldier was reported killed by "an improvised explosive device," the U.S. Central Command said. Two other soldiers were wounded in the episode in the Karkah district of Baghdad late Wednesday.
The dead soldier, whose name was not yet released, was from the 1st Armored Division. The military had no other details.
U.S. officials in Washington gave no immediate details of how al-Majid came into U.S. custody. Central Command did not immediately say how al-Majid was captured or where he was being held.
Al-Majid was the king of spades in the deck of cards issued by the U.S. military to help soldiers identify former regime leaders.
The military had believed al-Majid was killed in April in an airstrike on a house in southern Iraq. But Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in June that interrogations of Iraqi prisoners indicated he might still be alive.
Saddam's paternal first cousin and a former army sergeant, al-Majid was considered one of the most powerful men in Saddam's inner circle.
After Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he named al-Majid governor of the conquered emirate for the first three months of the seven-month occupation. By all accounts, he supervised the systematic looting and suppression of the emirate before he returned to Baghdad in November 1990.
Also today, U.S. forces captured a suspected senior member of Saddam's Fedayeen militia who was carrying a shopping list for explosives materials near Baqouba, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, a military official said.
The man, identified as Rashid Mohammed, was believed to be trying to organize a 600-strong militia in the area. He also was holding what appeared to be list of Iraqis to be killed when soldiers stopped his car on a highway north of Baqouba and detained him along with two others, said Lt. Col. William Adamson, of the 588th Engineering Battalions.
Search for bodies
Meanwhile, hundreds of soldiers and civilians, assisted by sniffer dogs, searched for bodies today amid the destroyed U.N. offices in the Canal Hotel, said David Roath from the U.S. Defense Department, who is overseeing the recovery efforts. He said evidence of human remains was being collected and would be sent to a lab for testing, Roath said, without elaborating.
Today's search uncovered three more bodies, said U.N. spokesman Salim Lone, raising the toll to at least 23.
About 100 U.N. support and administrative staff, out of a total 300 in Iraq, were being flown to Amman, Jordan, and Larnaca, Cyprus, according to Romiro Lopez da Silva, Iraq coordinator for U.N. humanitarian programs.
He said 86 U.N. staffers were seriously wounded in the Tuesday attack and were evacuated as their condition allowed. He said two U.N. colleagues still were unaccounted for and an unknown number of people, visitors to the headquarters building, still were buried in the rubble.
FBI agents investigating the blast determined that the bomb consisted of about 1,000 pounds of old ordnance likely culled from Saddam Hussein's old arsenal.
The explosives were piled onto the back of a Soviet-made military flatbed truck known as a KAMAZ, not a cement truck as earlier thought, Special Agent Thomas Fuentes said.
The vehicle was driven to just outside the concrete wall recently built around the hotel and detonated. Some munitions failed to explode, and investigators and rescue workers had to dig through the site carefully Wednesday to avoid setting them off.
U.S. Army soldiers have turned up plentiful weapons caches across the country in past months.
L. Paul Bremer, the American civil administrator in Iraq, said on American television Wednesday that there were "at least two hypotheses" over the bombing -- one blaming remnants of the Saddam regime, the other, insurgents from neighboring countries.
He said more than 100 foreign terrorists were believed to be in Iraq but did not say which theory seemed more likely at this stage.
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