BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Guerrillas attacked a police station in
central Iraq yesterday, wounding six people, while U.S. forces kept
up their daily raids against suspected rebel strongholds with an
overnight raid in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.

Meanwhile, a London-based Arabic newspaper quoted Iraq's former
planning minister as saying that Saddam might still have stashed
away in foreign banks tens of billions of dollars that he skimmed
for years from oil revenues.

Jewad Hashem, Iraq's planning minister in the late 1960s and
early '70s who now lives in Canada, said that 5 percent of oil
revenues was ordered deposited abroad in accounts under Saddam's
supervision when Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972.

Two rockets struck the Ramadi Police Directorate, 100 miles west
of Baghdad, as officers gathered inside to receive their monthly
salaries, said Maj. Samir Habib. Two policemen and four civilians
were wounded, he said.

Ramadi, a town on the main highway between Iraq and Jordan, is
part of the so-called Sunni Triangle - a region north and west of
Baghdad that has seen fierce resistance to the U.S.-led
occupation.

The U.S. raid in Tikrit netted several illegal weapons. Such
counterinsurgency operations have come under increasing criticism
recently, with many analysts warning that the U.S. military was
risking alienating significant segments of Iraqis through
heavy-handed military responses to hit-and-run attacks by the
insurgents.

Hashem's assertion is in his autobiography, which is being
excerpted in the Asharq Al-Awsat pan-Arab daily.

In Wednesday's except, he wrote that Iraq's former Revolutionary
Command Council issued the decree to create a sort of war chest for
Saddam's Baath Party.

There was no way to independently confirm Hashem's story.
International efforts are under way to track accounts around the
world in the name of Saddam, the Baath Party and other former Iraqi
officials.

The former minister said Saddam did not want to repeat the
mistake of 1963 when a military coup toppled the first Baath
government after nine months and it could not return to power
quickly because it lacked money.

Hashem said that by his calculation the 5 percent revenues from
1972 until 1990 would amount to $31 billion. After 1990, United
Nations sanctions following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait blocked the
free transfer of money abroad.

On Wednesday, officials said they were considering creating a
specialized Iraqi paramilitary battalion to help fight the
insurgents. The plan appears to be aimed at bolstering
counterinsurgency efforts and replacing U.S. combat troops in the
anti-guerrilla role with Iraqi forces.

The tactical unit would be capable of conducting independent
operations.

American officials in Baghdad and Washington said Wednesday that
the new 1,000-member unit would be formed by uniting fighters from
five Iraqi political parties under the joint leadership of the U.S.
military and the emerging Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

If created, the paramilitary unit would represent a significant
policy reversal by the United States, which previously declared
private militias illegal and called on Iraqi political leaders to
disband them.

The Pentagon's policy chief said Wednesday the United States
would welcome militia members into the Iraqi security forces as
long as they agreed to drop their previous party affiliations.

"We are willing to take people into these forces as long as when
they come in they are not operating as members of these other
(militia) forces," U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith said in Washington.

The militia members would be recruited as individuals, not as
intact units, Feith said.

Also Wednesday, U.S. soldiers captured former Brig. Gen. Daham
al-Mahemdi, who is suspected of recent contacts with Saddam, in
Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, the military said.

Al-Mahemdi is suspected of keeping in indirect contact with
Saddam, while directing guerrilla attacks on U.S. soldiers.

In another raid in Baghdad, Iraqi police and U.S. troops seized
a close aide to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who
opposes the U.S. occupation. They said Amar Yassiri was arrested on
suspicion of involvement in an Oct. 12 ambush on U.S. troops in
which two soldiers died.

But yesterday, a spokesman for al-Sadr denied that Yassiri was
in any way connected to the cleric.

"Amar Yassiri does not represent us in any way now," said Sheik
Fouad Hassan. "We would like to confirm that we have nothing to do
with the killing of the two soldiers."

Hassan said Yassiri had been the head of a security committee
formed in Sadr City - a mainly Shiite district in eastern Baghdad -
in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Saddam's regime. Yassiri's
role ended when the Iraqi police were reconstituted, Hassan
said.