Killing 2 sons spurs debate

BAGHDAD, Iraq — By killing Odai and Qusai Hussein instead of capturing them, U.S. forces lost a chance to expose the inner workings of Saddam's regime, provide clues to the dictator's whereabouts and yield intelligence on anti-American guerrilla operations, critics say.

But troops faced a fusillade of gunfire from the holdouts and may have feared that sympathetic crowds would rally to defend the besieged sons, who might not have revealed key information under interrogation anyway, officials respond.

Beyond that, the brothers' deaths removed a chance to learn where they had hidden hundreds of millions of dollars and where their father stashed billions during his 23-year rule.

On the streets of Baghdad, where gunfire broke out in celebration of the deaths, residents said Wednesday they wished American forces had captured Odai and Qusai alive — ready to stand trial, face their victims and suffer punishment for the horrors they inflicted on Iraq.

"We are happy for this, but we hoped that they would have been captured instead of killed so that they could have been tried by the Iraqi people," said Jassim Jabar, a 22-year-old tailor. "I hope Saddam will face the same fate soon."

Other Iraqis are demanding proof that the brothers are dead, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday that the United States soon will release photographs of the bodies. He said he had not decided precisely when the photos would be forthcoming.

For his part, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, coalition commander in Iraq, rejected criticism of the raid.

"I would never consider this a failure," Sanchez told a news conference Wednesday. "Our mission is to find, kill or capture. In this case, we had an enemy that was defending, it was barricaded and we had to take the measures that were necessary to neutralize the target."

Sanchez said the four men in a suburban villa in the northern city of Mosul — the two brothers, an unidentified man believed to be a bodyguard and a teenager reported to be a son of Qusai — held out in a fortified section of the house, repelling the U.S. attack with AK-47 automatic rifles.

By his account, the confrontation began when a U.S. interpreter used a bullhorn to demand they surrender. A hail of gunfire answered. Troops rushed the building, and four were wounded racing to the second floor. They withdrew, and the wounded were evacuated by helicopter.