BAGHDAD, Iraq - The unmistakable odor of death rises from the huge crater in Baghdad's Al Mansour district, where U.S. officials hope Saddam Hussein met his end.
More than a week after the attack that the Pentagon says targeted a restaurant Saddam had entered just minutes earlier, there still are bodies, or body parts, buried beneath the jumble of mud, rubble and scraps of clothing at the bottom of the 60-foot hole left by the bombing.
It is unlikely, however, that Saddam or his family were among those killed, according to residents of the street where the bombs struck on April 7. The Al Sa'ah restaurant, which was owned by Saddam's son Udai, backs onto the street, but the bombs hit two nearby homes inhabited by families, one Shiite and one Christian, who were well known in the area, neighbors say.
At least nine bodies were pulled from the wreckage, including the wife and three children of the Shiite civilian pilot who owned one of the houses and five relatives of a Christian man who owned a liquor store nearby and had fled to Mosul, leaving relatives to take care of his house.
Although neighbors did not know the relatives, they say there was no reason to believe any of them was connected to Saddam or his regime.
"These were ordinary people's homes, and they were ordinary people who died," said Maria Marcos, 38, an employee of the German Embassy who lives five houses away. "I'm sure Saddam wasn't here."
As the fighting winds down, the question of what happened to Saddam lingers as one of the biggest unanswered questions of the war.
U.S. officials say they have acquired DNA samples that will help them to determine if remains recovered from the Al Mansour site and others hit during the war belong to Saddam or members of his family. They say they are surveying several sites, though their claim that they had good intelligence that Saddam was in the Al Mansour area suggests they believe he survived an attempt to kill him on the first night of the war.
Although neighbors think it unlikely Saddam or his sons were in either of the homes that were hit, they do suspect he may have been in the area during the last days of the war. Several residents said they noticed unfamiliar cars moving around the area, and Saddam's sons, Udai and Qusai, were regular visitors to the restaurant.
"Nobody saw Saddam, but his bodyguards were here," said Rami Raad, 15, who lives on an adjoining street. "In the last days of the war, there were many different, modern cars coming through this way, armored cars with shaded windows with armed men."
The restaurant was heavily damaged but not destroyed in the blast, and people living in homes closer to the site of the bomb strike were uninjured.
The restaurant was closed during the war, but there were people in it at the time of the attack, according to Nada Al Imam, who lives in the house immediately to the left of the homes that were hit, and whose kitchen adjoins the restaurant's kitchen. She was washing dishes and heard men quarreling loudly in the restaurant immediately before the bombs struck.
Most people living in the street say they suspect the house to the right of the two destroyed homes may have been used by Saddam, or other senior leadership figures, as a hiding place during the war. The modest, two-story home had been bought by a military officer shortly before the war, but no one had noticed anyone moving in. Yusuf Rabieh, a university administrator who lives next door to the house, said the gate was always locked and he assumed the house was empty.
Yet neighbors who entered the badly damaged house after the strike point to evidence that it had been used recently. There was a sack of fresh rolls in the kitchen, and a pot of rice sat on a brand-new dining room table. There were new beds in two of the rooms, and there were supplies, since stolen, of Pepsi and mineral water. The house had five telephone lines, a privilege that would have been accorded only to senior Baath Party members.
No one rules out the possibility that Saddam or his sons were killed or injured by flying glass or shrapnel in any of the buildings nearby. The way in which the regime crumbled in the hours after the bombing lends credence to suspicions that at least some of the senior leadership died or disappeared at that time, Marcos said.
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