Gold bars worth £330m seized at border

US officers said yesterday that their troops had seized what appeared to be gold bars worth about £330m in a truck searched near the Syrian border.

Soldiers of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment stopped the Mercedes truck at the Qaim, border post.

Inside they found 2,000 gold bars, each weighing 18kg (nearly 40lb).

Depending on the purity of the gold, the haul was worth about $500m, officers said. A statement from US central command said it had been seized during a "routine traffic control search".

Two people in the truck were arrested. They told the soldiers that the bars were bronze and said they had been paid 350,000 dinars (about £200) to drive the truck from Baghdad to Qaim.

US troops have found several hoards of money since the end of the war. Last month they discovered £450m in dollar notes packed into metal boxes near one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in Baghdad.

Officials believe that Saddam's youngest son Qusay ordered the central bank to hand over nearly $1bn in currency just hours before the war began. Most of the money has been recovered, but these gold bars may also have come from the bank's reserves.

Washington has claimed several times that senior Ba'ath party figures fled Iraq to seek shelter in Syria.

This latest find will be used as more evidence to support the claim that many of the most senior figures in the regime, who have not yet been caught, may have slipped over the border.

In the first days after the war, looters poured through the central bank and Saddam's palaces, looting what they could find.

But only those with inside knowledge or with good contacts in the regime would have been likely to have located Iraq's gold reserves.

· The commander of US ground forces in Iraq said yesterday that he knew of no negotiations being held with envoys of Saddam's eldest son, but insisted that any surrender of Uday Hussein would have to be "unconditional".

The comments by Lieutenant General David McKiernan came in response to a report in the Wall Street Journal which said that Uday was considering surrendering to US forces.

Gen McKiernan said at a briefing in Baghdad: "Nobody's brought an offer from Uday to me, and I would facilitate his coming on in. But it would be unconditional."