Deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his sons, Uday and Qusay, held out in Baghdad for at least a week after the fall of the city and even appeared in public, an unnamed personal bodyguard of Uday Hussein has said.

The 28-year-old man served as one of Uday's coterie of handpicked bodyguards from 1997 till his former boss finally left Baghdad to organise guerrilla resistance further north, The Times reported in London on Friday.

The US on Wednesday morning claimed to have killed both Uday and Qusay in a raid on a house in the Iraqi city of Mosul. They also released photographs of the two to substantiate their claim.

When Baghdad fell on April 9, the three men were in separate houses in Adhamiya, a Sunni neighbourhood full of Baath Party loyalists, where Saddam had been on a televised walkabout two days earlier.

The bodyguard said Saddam survived several American attempts to kill him by changing safe houses frequently. Saddam, said the bodyguard, also suspected an informant within his camp.

According to the bodyguard, Saddam asked the suspect, a captain, to prepare a safe house behind a restaurant in the Mansour district for a meeting. They arrived, and left againalmost immediately by the back door. "Ten minutes after they went out of the door, it was bombed," the bodyguard said.

Saddam had the captain summarily executed, even as the Pentagon was claiming the strike had probably finished off Saddam and Uday.

Uday's bodyguard was not present on that occasion, but was there two days later when, to the astonishment of all around, Saddam and his sons appeared at Friday prayers at a mosque in Adhamiya, a few kilometres from where American troops were patrolling.

"There were crowds all around and an old woman came up to Saddam and asked, 'What have you done to us?'" the bodyguard recalled.

"Saddam clapped his hand to his head and said, 'What can I do? I trusted the commanders but they were traitors and betrayed Iraq. But we hope that, before long, we will be back in power and everything will be fixed,'" the bodyguard said.