Whatever else they lacked in their final hours, Uday and Qusay Hussein were evidently not short of cash.
The notorious brothers had scads of it with them when they were slain in the northern city of Mosul last week — more than $100-million in U.S. banknotes and Iraqi dinars, Newsweek reports in its current issue.
And that apparently wasn't the only unusual discovery alongside the brothers' bodies in the rubble of their borrowed villa. Inside Uday's briefcase were painkillers, bottles of cologne, new underwear, dress shirts, a silk tie, a supply of Viagra and a single condom, according to the weekly magazine.
Newsweek did not state the source of its information, and CNN reported a significantly lower amount of money — less than $500,000. But the information about the sexual paraphernalia is "perfectly in keeping with certainly Uday's lifestyle," Ken Pollack, director of Middle East policy research at Washington's Brookings Institution, told CNN. "You know, if there were some cattle prods and other implements of torture in there, that would have probably filled out his normal mode of travel."
Along with a mercurial temperament and a richly deserved reputation for sadism, Uday was widely regarded in Baathist Iraq as a rapist with a voracious sexual appetite.
One accusation frequently levelled was that if he spied an attractive young woman walking on the street, his bodyguards would be dispatched to get her, whether she wanted to accompany them or not. Senior Iraqi officials' girlfriends were also liable to be singled out for treatment, it was often said.
In Mosul yesterday, Iraqi contractors hired by the U.S. military began demolishing the house where the brothers were killed. With soldiers standing guard inside rolls of concertina wire, workers used jackhammers to pry off chunks of masonry. Bystanders asked them for souvenirs, but the soldiers told them that was out of the question.
The hunt for the brothers' father, Saddam Hussein, also continued. In Tikrit, site of a weekend raid on three farm houses, U.S. forces discovered yesterday a cache of 40 antitank mines, dozens of mortar rounds and hundreds of pounds of gunpowder — enough for a month of attacks on U.S. troops.
There was also no halt to the attacks on the occupying forces. One U.S. soldier was killed and three others injured when a grenade was dropped from a downtown Baghdad overpass onto a Humvee.
The death brought to 49 the number of U.S. soldiers killed by guerrillas since May 1, when U.S. President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq. In all, 163 U.S. soldiers have died in action so far, 16 more than in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
In another incident on a road north of Baghdad, insurgents floated a bomb down a river on a palm log and detonated it by remote control under a bridge the U.S. military was repairing. In a country with two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, bridges are vital and this was thought to be the first such attack.
In Washington, meanwhile, the State Department listed 30 countries it said have now agreed to contribute to an international stabilization force, without a new United Nations resolution.
The countries were identified as: Albania, Azerbaijan, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, El Salvador, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain and Ukraine.
There was no word on the number of troops pledged.
With a report from Associated Press
