Soldiers find $600m hoard in sealed-up safe houses

American officials confirmed yesterday that troops patrolling in Baghdad had found a hoard of $600m (£380m) in US banknotes at safe houses apparently controlled by senior members of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The money,in $100 bills, was stored in aluminium boxes in cottages on the Tigris, in an exclusive area where many senior Baath party officials and Republican Guard officers lived, about a mile from Saddam's main palace. The buildings were sealed with breeze block and concrete barricades.

Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, at Central Command in Qatar, confirmed last week's find and said the money had been taken by a military cargo plane to a unnamed location. "The money is first to be secured and examined by law enforcement officers to determine if it's real money," he said.

The Los Angeles Times, which reported the find over the weekend, said the soldiers who found the cache were in no doubt it was genuine. Each box was sealed with rivets and straps. Green tags bore the words Jordan National Bank in English and Arabic and a serial number. Inside, each stack of $100,000 was shrink-wrapped and the notes were numbered in series.

America suspects that it was either skimmed from Iraq's oil-for-food programme, administered by the UN, or represented profits from smuggling.