Syrian troops shot in border clash

US forces hunting for Saddam Hussein and his followers clashed with a Syrian border patrol, seriously injuring at least four guards, officials said yesterday.

The clash on Iraq's western border occurred last Wednesday when US special forces bombed a three-car convoy. But confusion surrounded the objective and outcome of the attack yesterday.

Defence officials refused to say whether Saddam had been the target or whether US forces engaged the Syrians from inside Iraq's borders.

The resort to lethal force, with the convoy reduced to cinders, suggested that the hunt for Saddam has assumed fresh urgency amid evidence that he is alive and in Iraq. Officials had hoped that the Iraqi leader or his two sons, Qusay and Uday, might be in the convoy. CIA officials downplayed such reports yesterday.

Defence department officials held out the possibility that other former senior leaders of the regime could have been in the cars and said they were conducting DNA tests to verify the identity of the passengers.

The exchange was the first with Syrian guards in the 11 weeks since American forces took control of Iraq.

A Syrian diplomat in Washington downplayed the clash saying that the firefight might have occurred after soldiers "accidentally" ran into one another in the desert.