Where Saddam Was Seen Before Bombs Hit
B A G H D A D, Iraq, April 15 -- For all the talk of Saddam Hussein's luxury palaces perched above underground bunkers, a modest building in Baghdad's Mansur neighborhood may have been a more important safe house than any of his palaces.
The house may have been where Saddam was staying on the night that U.S. forces, tried, but apparently failed, to kill the Iraqi leader. ABCNEWS' Brian Ross discovered the safe house today, when he and an investigative team went to the site that the United States targeted April 7.
Behind a popular Baghdad restaurant, four 2,000-pound bombs created a 60-foot deep crater, destroying four homes and killing 14 civilians. But neither Saddam nor his son Qusai were among the dead, neighbors said. The two were in the safe house, only a few steps away, and they apparently escaped.
Site of Saddam Speech
Inside the house is the room neighbors say Saddam used on the war's first night to tape a televised speech in which he wore glasses and read from notes. That room is bare now. Neighbors said that the blue curtain, the podium on the desk and the Iraqi flag seen in Saddam's speech were all set up in the room, but have since been looted.
The house had five separate phone lines, suggesting that it was used by Saddam or someone placed high in his regime. According to neighbors, even the very powerful in the area get at most only two phone lines. No regular house in Iraq would have five telephone lines in the same house.
Neighbors: No Americans Have Investigated Site
There were no signs whatsoever of the kind of underground bunkers U.S. officials said Saddam had built all over Baghdad.
Neighbors said the ABCNEWS team was the first group of journalists to visit the safe house, and there was no evidence that there had been any American presence there.
This surprised former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, now an ABCNEWS consultant in Baghdad. "I'm astounded there was no American military presence there — that no one had been there. There are no people doing forensic analysis. If the military thought Saddam was here, you'd expect them to be digging to find the remains to prove he was dead," Galbraith said.
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