By Oliver Burkeman

Tariq Aziz, the most internationally recognised face of the fallen Iraqi regime after Saddam Hussein himself, was in US custody last night after surrendering to American forces, Pentagon officials said. The detention of Mr Aziz, who served for many years as Iraq's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, is the biggest symbolic victory so far in the coalition's manhunt for senior figures of the former government.

He gave himself up in Baghdad after discussions with US forces through an intermediary, according to early reports, though central command did not immediately issue details. "He turned himself in," a US official said on condition of anonymity. "He was a major regime figure for a long, long time. He was the public face of the regime for a long time. He was close to Saddam for many years." Mr Aziz, the eight of spades in the Pentagon's deck of cards, is unlikely to possess information about weapons of mass destruction or Saddam's current whereabouts, intelligence experts said. However, the fact that Mr Aziz had been found alive increased the chances that Saddam and his sons were also still alive. He might also possess explosive information on the extent of past support for the regime in the west.

President George Bush was informed of the capture as he flew back to Washington from a public appearance in Ohio. On disembarking from Air Force One, he answered reporters' shouted questions with only a laugh and a thumbs-up. The capture of Mr Aziz will send a signal to the Iraqi people that Saddam's regime is behind them, said Haider Ahmed, a spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress. "Beyond any doubt, politically, Tariq Aziz is the most important official to be captured so far," Mr Ahmed said. A suave intellectual schooled in diplomatic protocol, Mr Aziz, 67, served as Saddam's primary communicator with the English-speaking world, rising to prominence after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 when he toured the world in an effort to encourage support for Baghdad. Yet he was believed to have attained little real power, because he was not a member of Saddam's Tikriti clan, and because he was a Christian, not a Muslim.

That did not dim Mr Aziz's fierce loyalty to the Ba'ath party, and to Saddam personally. He has said in the past that he would rather die than spend his last days in an Amer ican jail, prompting speculation last night that he might have cut a deal with US forces. "This is the first of the true inner circle, someone who changed his whole personality to be Ba'athist," said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA Middle Eastern specialist. "He will know things. He may not know where the weapons of mass destruction are, because that's compartmented information. "But he conducted their foreign policy, so he should know what kind of cooperation they were getting from their foreign friends." The surrender topped a run of successes in the search for regime officials. Mr Aziz is the 12th to be captured out of 55 most wanted that the Americans are searching for. "They're collapsing like a house of cards," said Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kurasiewicz, a Pentagon spokesman.

Iraq's former chief of intelligence has described how previous wars, sanctions and Saddam's fear of betrayal brought his military to its knees even before the US attacked. General Zuhayr Talib Abd al-Sattar al-Naqib, who is now in US custody, also dismissed the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but said nobody had been able to convince Saddam to hand over the documents that would have proved it. But in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in the hours before his surrender, he portrayed a regime in which Saddam made "staffing decisions based on his fears of betrayal, even when they undermined his military's effectiveness".

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