U.S. says man held in Iraq is not al Qaeda leader

By Dean Yates and Wisam Mohammed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The leader of al Qaeda in Iraq is still being hunted, the U.S. military said on Friday, after Iraqi officials wrongly declared Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been caught.

The detention of Masri would have been another blow for al Qaeda, which has been forced to regroup in northern Iraq after a wave of U.S. military assaults in and around Baghdad.

Iraqi officials said the confusion was caused after a man with a similar name was detained in an operation in the northern city of Mosul late on Wednesday.

Masri, an Egyptian, has a U.S. bounty of $5 million on his head. "He has not been detained," a senior U.S. military official told Reuters, declining to comment further.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh criticised Iraqi officials for earlier saying Masri had been caught.

"The person who was detained has nothing to do with him. He is not even a senior leader in al Qaeda, he is just an ordinary member," Dabbagh said.

It is not the first time there has been confusion over the fate of Masri. Iraq's Interior Ministry said a year ago he had been killed, but soon afterwards Sunni Islamist al Qaeda released an audio tape purportedly from him.

Al Qaeda in Iraq was headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi until he was killed in a U.S. air strike in June 2006. His successor, Masri, was Zarqawi's close associate.