REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, BAGHDAD -- Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Saturday said that the Iraqi security forces captured a leading figure in Saddam Hussein's Baath party in an operation based on intelligence reports.

In his address to a ceremony in Baghdad for the 146th anniversary for the Iraqi press, Abadi said "the security forces managed to arrest the terrorist Abdul Baqi Abdul Karim al-Sadoun by the efforts of the Iraqi intelligence."

Abadi did not give further details about how or where the arrest took place, saying that he prefers an official statement to declare the details later as interrogation is still underway with Sadoun.

However, al-Sadoun was arrested on Friday in south of the city of Kirkuk, which located some 250 km north of Baghdad, a police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Al-Sadoun held several important positions in Saddam's Baath party, including being a member of national leadership of Baath party, as well as head of the party's branches in southern Iraq and in the country's eastern province of Diyala.

He was wanted for crimes against humanity, accused of supervising the killing of hundreds of people during an uprising by Shiites in the south in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War, during which U.S. forces ended Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Al-Sadoun is also accused of recruiting and financing foreign terrorists in eastern and central Iraq, and is believed to be responsible for attacks against Iraqi civilians and police in the Iraqi cities of Nasiriya and Basra in the south, and in Diyala as well.

The Iraqi government and the U.S. military frequently blamed remnants of the former regime, as well as foreign militants, for much of the insurgent violence that erupted in the country after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and after the U.S. pullout from the country 2011.

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