IRAQI police discovered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi alive in the rubble of his bombed safe house, then watched him try to roll off a stretcher before dying, it emerged yesterday.

Announcing his death, US officials said on Thursday that the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq had been found dead after two F16s dropped a pair of 500lb bombs on his safe house in Hibhib, a village in Diyala province 48km (30 miles) northeast of Baghdad.

But Major-General Bill Caldwell said that he had learnt early yesterday that al-Zarqawi had survived the initial airstrikes on his two-floor breeze-block hideout.

“We did, in fact, see him alive,” General Caldwell said. “He mumbled something but it was indistinguishable and it was very short.”

US medics tried to save the life of the most-wanted man in Iraq, but it was too late, General Caldwell added. “Zarqawi attempted to sort of turn away off the stretcher,” he said. “Everybody resecured him back on to the stretcher but he died almost immediately from the wounds he’d received.

“He obviously had some kind of visual recognition of who they were because he attempted to roll off the stretcher, as I am told, and get away, realising it was the US military.”

General Caldwell added that the five others killed in the strike on Wednesday night included three women, and not one woman and a child, as the military had said.

Al-Zarqawi’s second wife Israa, in her late teens, and their 18-month-old baby, Abdul Rahman, died in the strike, Jordanian officials told The Times.Israa was the daughter of Yassin Jarrad, a Palestinian Islamic militant, who is blamed for the killing in 2004 of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, the Iraqi Shia leader.

Officials also said that Jordan would not allow the body of al-Zarqawi to be buried in his native country.

The Iraqi Government was braced for retaliation, and yesterday imposed a ban on traffic in Baghdad and Diyala province to try to avert an onslaught of suicide attacks and car bombings. US troops stormed 39 suspected insurgent sites in Iraq, further to 17 raids already conducted since al- Zarqawi’s death. Many were driven by information obtained in the hunt for the extremist leader. President Bush, addressing reporters after meeting Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, at his Camp David retreat in Maryland, said: “I don’t want the American people to think that the war is won with the death of one person.”

Mr Bush, who is scheduled to hold a video conference on Tuesday with the Iraqi leadership, refused to give a timeline for the withdrawal of the 132,000 US troops in Iraq. “I’ve told the American people I’d like to get our troops out as soon as possible, but the definition of ‘as soon as possible’ is depending upon victory in Iraq,” he said.

Ali al-Dabbagh, a Shia politician, said: “We should not be optimistic that the violence will go down dramatically. Zarqawi has spent the past three years in Iraq. He has brainwashed many Iraqis and Arabs and established many cells that operate independently.”

General Caldwell suggested that al-Zarqawi’s likely successor was an Egyptian national, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, whom the radical leader first met in 2001 at a terrorism training camp in Afghanistan. Al-Masri, who has a $50,000 (£27,000) price on his head, is believed have come to Baghdad in 2002 on a mission to set up al-Qaeda’s first cell in Iraq.

Amid speculation over al-Zarqawi’s successor, some Islamist websites pledged allegiance to a man named Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi. He has appeared in previous statements by al-Qaeda in Iraq as al-Zarqawi’s deputy. His name was on a release issued on Thursday by the group confirming al-Zarqawi’s death and vowing to continue his “holy war”.

Violence in Iraq has claimed at least 46 lives since Thursday night and al-Qaeda members in Iraq vowed that the death of their leader would make no difference. “The Americans understand that al-Zarqawi was only one man and there are many others who will carry on what he started,” Abu Majid, an al-Qaeda cell leader in western Baghdad, said.

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