Chris Tomlinson Associated Press Saturday, April 12, 2003; 2:51 PM
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The doors of the town house opened to reveal a playboy's fantasy straight from the 1960s: mirrored bedroom, lamps shaped like women, air-brushed paintings of a topless blonde woman and a mustached hero battling a crocodile.
On the wall and in the bedroom were photos of Saddam Hussein and one of his mistresses. Military officials suspect they found one of the paranoid Iraqi leader's many safe houses.
"This must have been Saddam's love shack," said Sgt. Spencer Willardson of Logan, Utah.
The split-level, one-bedroom town house is in a Baath Party enclave in an upscale neighborhood in central Baghdad where generals and senior party officials lived.
As U.S. officials set up command posts there, troops were going home by home, searching for looters and weapons.
Next door, where iron sheets were welded over all the windows, they found more than 6,000 Berretta pistols, 650 Sig Sauer pistols, 248 Colt Revolvers, 160 Belgian 7.65 mm pistols, 12 cases of Sterling submachine guns and four cases of anti-tank missiles all still in the unopened original boxes. There were also tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition mortars and cases of old handguns and heavy machine guns.
