The official said the corpses had been identified in the wreckage of Saturday's strike on the house of Ali Hassan al-Majid, who won his grisly nickname for ordering gas attacks that killed thousands of Kurds in 1988.

Investigators were digging through the debris at his house in the southern Iraqi city of Basra but Ali has not yet been found, the official said.

Two coalition aircraft struck the building with "laser-guided munitions" on Saturday.

Majid ordered the 1988 mustard gas attack on Halabja village to suppress a Kurdish uprising backed by Iran, which was at war with Iraq. An estimated 5,000 people died, most of them women and children.

Considered a right-hand man of the Iraqi president, Majid was put in charge of defending southern Iraq ahead of the US-led war launched March 20 to topple Saddam's regime.

New York-based Human Rights Watch in a report earlier this year called for the arrest and prosecution of Majid, saying he was responsible for the deaths or "disappearances" of around 100,000 non-combatant Kurds when he put down their revolt.

Al-Majid held authority over state agencies in Iraq's Kurdish regions at the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

He later played key roles in Iraq's 1990-91 occupation of Kuwait and in the suppression of a Shiite Muslim uprising following the 1991 Gulf war.

SPACE.WIRE