by Dhiya Hamid
AD-DAWR, Iraq, Sept 5 (AFP) - Confusion reigned Sunday over whether Iraqi forces had captured Saddam Hussein's loyal henchman Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri after an Iraqi general and the US military raised doubt over reports of his arrest.
Interior ministry and national guard officers said Iraq's second most wanted fugitive had been seized in a deadly gunbattle following a tip-off he was receiving medical treatment at a clinic near his and Saddam's Tikrit hometown.
But US commanders declined to confirm that the suspected insurgent financier they had sought for so long was finally behind bars and another national guard commander later denied his forces had got their man.
Residents of this bastion of Saddam loyalism certainly appeared to believe that US-backed forces had finally found their elusive quarry nine months after the ousted president himself was captured hiding down a hole in the same village.
An AFP correspondent saw shopkeepers downing shutters and other signs of mourning in an area that still has huge nostalgia for Saddam's regime.
It was the national guard commander for the Tikrit area, Colonel Abdullah Juburi, who announced Ibrahim's capture in a bloody battle around an Ad-Dawr doctor's clinic.
The sickly, 62-year-old former number two had gone there for a periodic blood transfusion enforced by longstanding leukaemia, when he was surprised by US-backed national guard officers, Juburi told AFP.
Ibrahim's supporters put ferocious resistance, Juburi said.
An interior ministry spokesman put the casualty toll from the ensuing gunbattle as high as 70.
However Juburi's immediate superior -- Major General Ahmed Khalaf Salman who commands the whole of north-central Iraq -- disavowed his subordinate's account.
"Our forces did not take part in any operation and did not capture Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri and we do not have any information concerning the subject," he said.
It is certainly true that there have been previous claims of Ibrahim's capture which later turned out to be unsubstantiated.
But equally US commanders might well have wanted to keep under wraps any suggestion such a prized intelligence asset was in friendly hands, or keep for themselves the announcement of such a major coup against their insurgent foes.
Asked to clarify the confusion over his earlier announcement that Ibrahim was indeed in national guard custody, interior ministry spokesman Colonel Adnan Abdelrahman said: "Call the defence ministry because these are the people who told us this story."
Defence ministry officials were not immediately available.
For its part, the US military said Ibrahim was not in its custody.
The US military went on to say that it had no record of its troops supporting any capture operation and added that it had received no formal notification from the Iraqis.
"They (US commanders) cannot confirm we had helicopters in the air or we were in a joint operation to capture him," said senior spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Slavonic.
Only Al-Qaeda's alleged Iraq commander Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is more sought-after than Ibrahim, who has had a 10-million dollar US bounty on his head since last November.
US commanders have long accused him of using Saddam's vast caches of hard currency to bankroll the insurgency that has dogged their troops virtually since his downfall.
They also charge that Ibrahim has used his reputation as a devout Muslim to forge an unholy alliance with Islamic militants they hold responsible for some of the deadliest attacks.
Amid the conflicting reports over Ibrahim's whereabouts, US and Iraqi forces pressed some of their most aggressive counter-insurgency operations in months.
US troops battled rebels in the northern town of Tall Afar for a second day while a combined force arrested 500 suspected militants in the heartland of the Sunni Muslim insurgency.
Iraqi police and national guardsmen, assisted by US forces, raided the town of Latifiya, 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of Baghdad, marking the first time the interim government had taken decisive action against Sunni insurgents since it took full powers in late June.
Twelve policemen were killed and 17 people wounded in the operation, with 500 suspected "terrorists" arrested and a large haul of weapons seized, including five barrels of TNT, an Iraqi intelligence officer said.
The town is part of a virtual no-go zone for US troops, Iraqi police and foreigners and has earned the name "Fallujah's second head" after the Sunni rebel strongold west of Baghdad.
The spot is where two French journalists, held by a group calling itself the Islamic Army of Iraq, disappeared on August 20.
Leading hardline cleric Sheikh Mehdi al-Sumaidaie issued a fatwa or Islamic decree demanding the immediate release of the two reporters -- Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot.
The cleric, an influential figure among Sunni militant groups, also lambasted the Iraqi government and US forces for staging the raid in Latifiya, saying it had harmed efforts for the French duo's release.
US troops and insurgents also fought for a second day in Tall Afar, which the military claims has serves as a way station for militants slipping into Iraq from Syria.
Fighting erupted after gunmen fired on a US army convoy outside the mainly Shiite Turkmen town, west of the main northern city of Mosul, police said.
US soldiers and Iraqi national guardsmen then poured into the town centre where clashes broke out lasting for about two hours before the combined force withdrew.
Elsewhere, the body of an Egyptian was found on a road north of Tikrit in the latest in a string of gruesome murders of foreigners suspected of working with the Americans in Iraq.
Two Iraqis were killed and five wounded in a US air raid near the town of Balad, another Sunni insurgent bastion, medics said.