Saddam 'refused to hand over al Zaqawri'

Saddam Hussein refused to turn over wanted extremist Abu Musab Al Zarqawi before the US-led invasion, said Jordan's King Abdullah.

The king said Jordanian authorities had put Zarqawi, head of the Al Qaeda network in Iraq, under surveillance and found he entered the country from a "neighbouring country."

"From the time Zarqawi entered Iraq, before the fall of the former regime, we made great efforts to bring him back and try him here, but our requests to the former regime were in vain," Abdullah said in an interview published Thursday in a Pan-Arab newspaper.

"We provided the Iraqi authorities with the precise intelligence, but they did not respond favourably to Amman's requests," he added.

Many Arab Muslims dismissed the religious justification for killing innocents given by Zarqawi, saying it was not the Islam they knew and any resistance had rules to protect civilians.

Zarqawi has a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head in connection with a wave of deadly insurgent attacks, kidnappings and murders.

He is also wanted in his native Jordan, where has already been convicted in absentia for the murder of a US aid worker in December 1984 and for planning a mega-attack on Jordanian government facilities.