Al-Qa'ida chiefs are hiding in Iraq, US claims

A number of senior al-Qa'ida figures have taken refuge inside Iraq and are being sheltered by Saddam Hussein, the United States government claimed yesterday.

The claim came as President George Bush met his senior military advisers in Texas and said the removal of the Iraqi President was "in the interests of the world".

But he indicated that the US was in no hurry. "I'm a patient man," Mr Bush told reporters at his ranch. "The American people know my position, and that is that regime change is in the interests of the world. How we achieve that is a matter of consultation and deliberation."

Unnamed US government officials said senior figures in Osama bin Laden's organisation had entered Iraq after the US-led military operation in Afghanistan and their presence had been noted in a series of intelligence reports.

The officials said while Iraq had long been known as a refuge for fleeing al-Qa'ida fighters, what had not previously been known was their number and seniority. "There are some names you'd recognise," a defence official said, without revealing any names.

On Tuesday, the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, repeated claims that al-Qa'ida figures may be operating inside Iraq but declined to give details. He said it was very unlikely that President Saddam was not ­ at the very least ­ aware of their presence.

"I suppose that, at some moment, it may make sense to discuss that publicly," said Mr Rumsfeld. "It doesn't today. But what I have said is a fact: that there are al-Qa'ida in a number of locations in Iraq."

He added: "In a vicious, repressive dictatorship that exercises near total control over its population, it's very hard to imagine that the government is not aware of what's taking place in the country."

It was claimed that the reports of a significant al-Qa'ida presence in Iraq would support the case for ousting President Saddam. Mr Bush's meetings at his Texas ranch yesterday were called to discuss military budgets, though it was widely reported that Iraq was also on the agenda.

Countering some prominent Republicans who have urged caution on Iraq, the House Majority Whip Tom DeLay said yesterday that the US must attack Iraq, "and the sooner, the better".

But there was also scepticism about the reports on the presence of senior al-Qa'ida figures, first made in The Washington Post, with some observers saying it smacked too much of a deliberate leak.

David Mack, a vice-president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute think-tank, said: "The basic information is not new. There has been attention paid to this area. I am a little sceptical ... I spoke to some very knowledgeable officials within the government and they said 'yes, the people probably were al-Qa'ida,' but doubted that they were linked to Saddam.

"Recurring reports blaming Iraq for everything are giving Iraqi hardliners like myself a bad name, because some people do strain to find the smoking gun and they tend to cloud a lot of the good reasons for regime change."

Claims of al-Qa'ida figures operating inside northern Iraq were first made in March when The New Yorker magazine carried a series of interviews with captured al-Qa'ida prisoners, held by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the pro-US Iraqi opposition groups that recently travelled to Washington for meetings with administration officials.

The report said Iraqi intelligence had been in close touch with officials in Osama bin Laden's group for years, and the two organisations jointly ran a terrorist organisation, Ansar al-Islam, that operates in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, protected by US and British planes.