Hunt for Saddam intensifies as Iraqis plead for protection

The hunt for Saddam Hussein and his chief lieutenants intensified last night as Allied forces tightened their grip on Iraq's major cities.

In Baghdad, US forces said a dusk-to-dawn curfew was under discussion as they attempt to stamp out civil disorder and looting that has emptied city hospitals, banks and offices.

Joint patrols of the US military and Iraqi police officials were being finalised in response to demands from local people who are barricading themselves inside their homes from fear.

During a search of a primary school in a middle-class area of the city, US soldiers came across a grim reminder that the threat from Iraqi fighters was still real: dozens of explosive-laden vests that could be used by suicide bombers. Empty hangers suggested that suicide bombers might already be out in the city. In a school next door, the Marines found hundreds of huge crates of weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles and shoulder-launched rockets, which local residents said had been unloaded about a month ago by Saddam's Fedayeen fighters.

But the Allies were not distracted from what still appears to be the main focus of the campaign: the destruction or capture of the Iraqi leadership. As American warplanes continued to soften up targets in Tikrit, Saddam's home town north of Baghdad, Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks at US Central Command said that rewards of "appropriate prices" were out for the President and key aides.

Amid conflicting and unconfirmed suggestions about whether Saddam was dead or alive, Gen Brooks refused to speculate. He acknowledged that while US forces had – apparently briefly – surveyed the site of the restaurant in the Mansur district of Baghdad, destroyed by a "decapitation" missile strike on Monday, it had not yet been able thoroughly to research it.

The area is claimed by US forces to be a Baathist stronghold. Local residents were quoted as saying that Saddam's younger son Qusay, who is in charge of the military protection of Baghdad and Tikrit, was seen alive shortly after the restaurant was obliterated by four 2,000lb bombs.

The CIA called in the strikes after learning that Saddam and his two sons, Qusay and Uday, were in the restaurant. However British intelligence sources reported that Saddam escaped moments before the bombs hit. Gen Brooks said: "We are not searching rock by rock through the rubble and that's not going to happen any time soon."

US Central Command announced yesterday that special forces had detained 59 men "of military age" as they travelled towards Iraq's western border with Syria. Gen Brooks said the men had been carrying $630,000 in cash, and letters offering rewards for killing American soldiers.

He declined to fuel speculation that they could be foreign Arab fighters engaged to fight for the regime by giving details of their nationalities.

"We've found people who were not Iraqis in a variety of places...We certainly know they were leaving Iraq to the west," Gen Brooks said. The deputy director of operations also said that special forces had discovered two unmanned drones with the "capability" to deliver chemical weapons during a raid on a phosphate plant at Al Qaim, a town close to the Syrian border where there has been fierce fighting over the past fortnight.

Beside being a possible crossing point for fleeing regime members, the town is also the site of missile launchers used to fire Scuds at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. But as the allied strategic emphasis switched to the north of Baghdad, Gen Brooks played down the importance of Tikrit as a final stronghold of Saddam's regime: "If Tikrit falls, then that's just one more city."

Tikrit is the only major city not in Allied hands. But mirroring the situation in Baghdad, the other major cities in Iraq were still in the grip of looters, despite the presence of Allied soldiers.

US soldiers advanced into Mosul yesterday for the first time, where there were clashes between the Arab population and Kurds. Meanwhile, the Kurds who had marched on the oil city of Kirkuk on Thursday, prompting alarm in Turkey, promised to withdraw later in the day to prevent a diplomatic incident.

In Basra, which is held by British troops, soldiers were preparing to launch patrols with local police officers in an attempt to quell the civil disorder that broke out with the collapse of the regime.