President George W. Bush said today that Saddam Hussein will face the justice that he "denied to millions" but that his capture by US forces will not mean the end of violence in Iraq. In a televised address, President Bush told the the Iraqi people: "You will not have to fear the rule of Saddam Hussein ever again."
Meanwhile members of Iraq's governing council said they saw Saddam in US custody and found him defiant and unrepentant after his three decades of iron rule.
Mr Adnan Pachachi, among four members of the council who were taken to see Saddam, confirmed his identity at a news conference.
"He seemed rather tired and haggard but he was unrepentant and defiant at times," said Mr Pachachi, who was foreign minister before Saddam's Baath party took power in 1968.
US troops captured Saddam hiding in a hole near his home town of Tikrit in a major coup for Washington's beleaguered occupying force in Iraq.
Grubby, bearded and "very disorientated", the 66-year-old fallen dictator was dug out by troops from a cramped hiding pit during a raid on a farm in Ad-Dawr village late on Saturday, US Major-General Ray Odierno told a news conference in Tikrit.
"He was just caught like a rat," he said today in one of Saddam's grandiose former palaces nearby on the Tigris river. Not a shot was fired, though Saddam, who once seemed almost to believe his own claims of invincibility and urged his men to go down fighting the invaders, was armed with a pistol.
Gunfire crackled in celebration across the country as Iraqis greeted a US military video showing their once feared leader, dishevelled and sporting a bushy black and grey beard, undergoing a medical examination after eight months on the run.
The arrest is a boon for US President George W. Bush after a run of increasingly bloody attacks on US troops that imperil his campaign for re-election next year. The White House, though, warned that violence was likely to go on for some time.
"We got him," the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, told a Baghdad news conference. "The tyrant is a prisoner."
Cheering Iraqi journalists shouted "Death to Saddam!" One, who had been tortured in Saddam's jails, broke down in tears. Iraqi and US officials said some $750,000 in $100 bills was found near the rat-infested warren of hideouts close to the Tigris riverbank.
Leading members of the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council said they would put Saddam on trial in Baghdad under a tribunal agreed with Washington only last week. He may face the death penalty as he answers for a three-decade reign of terror and for leading his oil-rich nation into three disastrous wars.
The capture of Saddam, the "ace of spades" and number one on the US wanted list, was in stark contrast to the bloody end of his sons Uday and Qusay, who died with guns blazing in July. Their father kept up a series of taped appeals to his followers after that. But a huge manhunt and a $25 million price on his head must have cramped any role in the guerrilla war. It was unclear if any bounty would be paid for his capture -- US forces paid out $30 million to a man who informed on his sons.
A US official said an Iraqi prisoner provided the initial tip on Saddam. Iraqi officials said Kurdish forces were involved in running him to ground though not involved in the arrest.
It was a humiliating end to a lifelong adventure that began not far away in a poor village on the Tigris just outside Tikrit. Clan connections in the Sunni-dominated military and a taste for ruthless street violence took Saddam to the top of the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party which seized power in a 1968 coup.
He crushed all opposition and lavished huge amounts of Iraq's oil wealth on marble-lined palaces and massive monuments to himself. Many of the former are now barracks for US troops.
The statues were pulled down by joyful Iraqis months ago.