US army says it has detained a female member of Zarqawi network

BAGHDAD - US troops have detained a female member of the Al-Qaeda group headed by Iraq's most wanted man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, US military officials in Iraq said.
She is "someone who was picked up" within the last 30 days "and is part of the Zarqawi network... She is at Camp Cropper," Major General William Brandenburg, the head of US military detention operations in Iraq, said, adding that she was one of three females in custody.
She is the only known female arrested who worked for Zarqawi's Organization of Al-Qaeda of Jihad in the Land of Two Rivers.
The other two female detainees are Rihab Rashid Taha, a scientist who became known as "Dr. Germ" for helping Saddam Hussein make weapons out of anthrax, and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a biology researcher known as "Mrs. Anthrax".
Camp Cropper, home to 110 detainees, is the high security prison inside the compound of the Baghdad airport, where Saddam Hussein and some of his top lieutenants are held, Brandenburg said.
The general said that if Zarqawi, who has a 25 million dollar bounty on his head, is captured he will be in US custody.
"He would be ours, the coalition. We would detain him... the central court of Iraq would be the one that would prosecute him," Brandenburg said.
The Iraqi government claimed Thursday that it had killed or captured all the lieutenants of top fugitive Abu Musab al-Zarqawi except for his top operative in Mosul, a man known as Abu Talha.
It released a diagram showing a recent picture of the Jordanian-born Zarqawi surrounded with the boxed names of 19 of his alleged accomplices and cell leaders.

03/11/2005 15:04 GMT