Suspected al Qaeda leader in Iraq arrested

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More than eight hours after the Iraqi announcement, the U.S. military said it still had no confirmation that Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian, had been seized.

If true, the arrest would be another blow for Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, which has been forced to regroup in northern Iraq after a wave of U.S. military assaults in the past year.

An Interior Ministry spokesman said an associate of Masri detained in an earlier operation took Iraqi security forces late on Wednesday to where the al Qaeda leader was hiding.

After being detained, Masri confessed to being the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, he said, adding that his identity still had to be confirmed. Other Iraqi security officials said the suspect, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, was in U.S. custody for identification. U.S. military officials did not comment on this.

Al Qaeda in Iraq was headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi until he was killed in a U.S. air strike in June 2006. His successor, Masri, was Zarqawi's close associate, and has a U.S. bounty of $5 million on his head.

Duraid Kashmula, the governor of Nineveh province of which Mosul is the capital, said the detained man had confessed to being Masri.

"When police entered the house, they found him asleep," Kashmula said, adding the suspect was alone.

"These is no doubt that the person arrested is Masri. The operation was very quick and easy. There were no clashes."

U.S. officials blame al Qaeda in Iraq for most big bombings in the country, including an attack on a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that set off a wave of sectarian killings that nearly tipped Iraq into all-out civil war.

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