WASHINGTON: A mortally wounded Zarqawi was still alive and mumbling on a stretcher when Iraqi police arrived at the site bombed by US forces, a top American military spokesman said on Friday.

"He mumbled something but it was indistinguishable and it was very short," Major General Bill Caldwell, briefing reporters at the Defence Department from his post in Baghdad.

The US military earlier had displayed images of the battered face of Zarqawi and reported that he had been identified by fingerprints, tattoos and scars. Biological samples from his body also were delivered to an FBI crime laboratory in Virginia for DNA testing. The results were expected in three days.

Caldwell said on Friday that authorities made a visual identification of al-Zarqawi upon arriving at the site of the airstrike.

He said that when the terrorist "attempted to sort of turn away off the stretcher, everybody rescued him back onto the stretcher. ... He died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he'd received from this airstrike."

"We did in fact see him alive," Caldwell said. "There was some sort of movement he had on the stretcher and he did die a short time later. There was confirmation from the Iraqi police that he was found alive."

Al-Zarqawi was killed at 6:15 pm Baghdad time Wednesday after an intense two-week hunt that US officials said first led to the terror leader's spiritual adviser and then to him.

US General George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, said at the time that the American airstrike targeted "an identified, isolated safe house." Four other people, including a woman and a child, were killed with al-Zarqawi and Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, the terrorist's spiritual consultant.

Caldwell said it was unclear whether al-Zarqawi was trying to get away as he writhed around on his stretcher.

Source: China Daily