May 02 2007 at 09:36AM
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By Ammar Karim
Baghdad - The Iraqi government and its tribal allies were scouring dangerous territory on Wednesday for evidence to prove their claims that Al-Qaeda's Iraq chief had been killed in a clash between armed factions.
Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf, the interior ministry's operations director, admitted Iraq has still not acquired any body or human remains to back up intelligence reports that Abu Ayyub al-Masri is dead.
"So far we don't yet have it, but there are efforts underway to look for the body," said Khalaf, whose claim 24 hours earlier that Masri had been killed was scorned by Al-Qaeda and treated with caution by his US allies.
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A coalition of Sunni tribes that has vowed to defeat Al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for Masri's alleged death, claiming that they tracked him to an area just north of Baghdad on Tuesday and killed him in a dawn ambush.
"We have evidence and eyewitnesses and our contacts with the tribes there all confirm the killing," said Hamid al-Hayis, head of the Anbar Salvation Council, the armed wing of the Anbar Awakening, an alliance of sheikhs.
Hayis said finding proof of the deaths of Masri and a small group of fellow Al-Qaeda militants was proving difficult, because the orchards and villages of the Nibae area near Taji are still partly controlled by insurgents.
"The area is still under their control, early this morning we sent an armed group to scout the situation, but we haven't heard back from them yet," he told AFP, in a telephone interview.
According to US commanders, Masri - who is said to be a veteran Egyptian jihadi and car bomb expert - took control of Al-Qaeda's Iraqi franchise in June last year after the death of his predecessor Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Since then, he has been reported killed or wounded several times, and Tuesday's new report has been greeted with caution by the US military.
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