The fugitive deputy of Iraq's late dictator Saddam Hussein, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, on Tuesday defied the United States to capture him alive in a rare newspaper interview. "The Americians will only have me as a martyr," Duri told the Algerian Arabic-language daily Ennahar in the interview, where he also denied being in captivity or having fled to an Arab nation.
"We will invite (US President Barack) Obama to negotiations soon," he added, in a reference to his banned Baath party, which had ruled out talks proposed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, stating his government consisted of "traitors and spies."
Ennahar said it had reached Duri after six months of contacts inside Iraq, Jordan and Syria, then sent written questions to Hussein's former right-hand man, who answered in a letter of which the newspaper published a facsimile. Duri is wanted by the United States, which accuses him of organising and financing insurgency inside Iraq, but in the interview he said: "The Americans killed 50,000 Iraqi scholars."