SADDAM HUSSEIN'S sons Uday and Qusay were killed by US troops yesterday after a fierce six-hour gunbattle in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Several hours after four badly charred bodies were pulled from a villa belonging to a first cousin of Saddam, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the head of coalition forces in Iraq, announced: "We are certain that Uday and Qusay were killed today. We've used multiple sources to identify the individuals."

General Sanchez said that US troops surrounded the villa after an informant, believed to be the villa owner , had tipped off coalition forces that Saddam's sons were inside.

The battle erupted after 200 members of the 101st Airborne Division, together with elite US Delta Force and Navy Seal troops speedily surrounded it.

"The suspects barricaded themselves in the house and resisted fiercely," General Sanchez said. "They died in a fierce gunbattle."

Witnesses described the engagement as a six-hour US pounding of the building with anti-tank rounds, machinegun fire and rockets from helicopter gunships. Khasrow Guran, the deputy governor of Mosul, said that two of the bodies were bearded. Two other bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the building - that of a teenage boy, and a bodyguard. Qusay has a 14-year-old son, Mustafa, who usually travels with him.

A female relative of the villa's owner named him as Nawaf al-Zaidani, a sheikh of the Bu Issa tribe. He informed US forces that Qusay and Uday, Qusay's son and a bodyguard named Abdul Samad had taken refuge in the house.

"He wanted to get rid of them," the female relative, who asked not to be named, told Agence France-Presse.

Four US soldiers were wounded in the operation, with at least one Iraqi bystander killed and five others wounded. The stone-columned villa was left ablaze and largely destroyed, with neighbouring buildings also wrecked.

General Sanchez said that US forces were searching the villa for clues to the whereabouts of Saddam, who still remains at large with a $25 million bounty on his head.

Mosul, 280 miles north of Baghdad, lies outside the "Sunni triangle", where Saddam still enjoys strong support and the area of the most bloody attacks against US troops, but it is a transit point for former members of the regime seeking to reach Syria.

General Sanchez added that the US expected to pay out the $15 million reward that the Bush Administration has offered for information leading to the death or capture of each of Saddam's sons.

The targets of the raid were viewed as so senior that minutes after the bodies were pulled from the smouldering villa, but before they had been formally identified, President Bush was briefed about the raid by Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, in the Oval Office.

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