Chemical Ali's palace 'wrecked by looters'

It was a potent symbol of the fall of a corrupt regime – the play palace of Chemical Ali, looted by the people he was sent to govern.

A smashed photograph lay in the entrance hall, the faces ripped out but clearly showing Saddam Hussein and one of his generals, perhaps his cousin, the man dubbed Chemical Ali for his atrocities against the Kurds.

At the bottom of his once opulent swimming pool lay the proof that this was the general's house – a discarded notebook, each page stamped with his full name and title – Ali Hassan al–Majid, leader of the southern area.

Printed at the top of every page was a quote from the Koran: "Your victory is from Allah and no one can ever defeat you."

But the house's glories lay in ruins, looted by the Iraqis who had the most reason to fear the one–time leader of Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat.

The general himself, a cousin of Saddam Hussein, has vanished deep into the heart of the paramilitary death squads he still controls in the south of Iraq.

Should he ever be captured, he faces certain trial for war crimes, including using poison gas in Halabja in 1988, killing 5,000; leading brutal purges in the north, killing more than 100,000; looting, pillaging and torturing Kuwaitis during the 1990 invasion; and leading mass executions to repress the 1991 uprisings in Basra and Nasiriyah.

But his hedonistic home near Basra could not be further removed from that grim list of atrocities, or more of a world away from the lives of the Iraqi farmers who neighbour him.

While Iraqi children beg for clean water at roadsides, this house boasts a 25ft swimming pool that could be in Bel Air, not the heart of the desert.

Elaborate wooden fretwork at the door lay smashed by the looters, and the huge smoked glass windows that would have ensured the general's privacy also lay in shards on the stone–tiled floor, alongside the fragments of a chandelier.

Elsewhere two plush bathroom suites had been smashed by the looters, and the contents of every room were ripped out and taken, probably to be sold as scrap by Iraqis desperate to scrape together money for food.

Among the debris in one of the outbuildings lay a Baath Party membership card for a young man, issued in 2001, and syringes carrying biohazard warnings, labelled as arterial blood samplers.

Locals had told British soldiers about the mansion, a Moorish–style building hidden from the road by a barrier and guardhouse, a long, winding drive and high banks of sand, designed to protect inhabitants from gunfire.

One of the informants was waiting for the soldiers at the house, anxious to check that his identity would be protected.

He hid his face in the red and white checked headdress worn by the Gulf Arabs and spoke excitedly in Arabic.

"Everyone knows that Chemical Ali lived here," he told interpreters, adding that he did not know when the general had left.

"It is very dangerous for me," he said, clearly terrified that he would face vicious reprisals if it was known he had led the British to Chemical Ali's house.