"It is certainly a dangerous area to speculate on, given the events of the past few weeks, but I am still confident that either he or his remains will be found," Hoon said on BBC radio.

"Determined efforts are being made to track him down and to bring to justice those leading elements of the regime who perpetrated such horrors for the Iraqi people over so many years."

He said the US-led coalition was hopeful that it could get useful information out of Amir al-Saadi, Saddam's chief scientific adviser, who surrendered to US forces in Baghdad on Saturday.

"We are hoping to get some useful information out of him and indeed out of others as increasingly we take more territory and identify those individuals who should have useful information about the (alleged) weapons (of mass destruction) programmes," he said.

SPACE.WIRE