WASHINGTON, June 21 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - An ex-top Iraqi official has told American interrogators that the Iraqi leader and his two sons survived the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and are likely hiding in the country, U.S. defense officials have told American newspapers.

Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti told investigators that he, Uday and Qusay Hussein had been with Saddam Hussein after the war started but the group split up, Agence France Presse (AFP) quoted the New York Times, Saturday, June 21.

But the U.S. officials said the United States regarded the information as having huge potential significance, and that clandestine American military activity aimed at capturing Saddam and his sons, Uday and Qusay, had increased sharply.

Quoting unnamed Defense Department officials, the paper said the accuracy of the claims made by Al-Takriti, the "ace of diamonds" in the U.S. pack of cards of top wanted Iraqis who was arrested in Iraq Monday, June 16, had not been assessed yet.

On Friday, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer told the BBC that the arrest of the other aces in the pack - Saddam Hussein and his two sons - was still America's "major objective".

If Al-Takriti's account is true, it would be "the most authoritative confirmation that neither Saddam nor his sons were killed in American attacks in March and April," The Times wrote.

Al-Takriti, who ranked behind only Saddam and his sons in importance in the Iraqi government, has told the interrogators that during the weeks after the invasion began, he spent time in hiding with the former Iraqi leader himself and then fled to Syria with Uday and Qusay, the paper reported.

The three men later returned to Iraq after being expelled by the authorities in Damascus, according to reports in the Washington Post and New York Times.

But recent U.S. intelligence intercepts suggest Saddam Hussein and his sons are alive and in Iraq, and efforts to capture them have intensified, reports say.

A senior Defense Department official declined to provide any details about the newly energized search for Saddam and his sons, which others said was being carried out by Task Force 20, a secret military organization that includes Army and Navy counterterrorist personnel, the report said.

But the official made clear that the operations had been prompted by information provided by Al-Takriti, who has been questioned over the last four days at an American military installation in Baghdad, AFP reported.

The information he could give has "enormous potential significance", the New York Times says.

"You follow up every lead that you can get, and when you get a person who's that high up in the regime, it's obviously in your benefit to move quickly on anything he tells you," the paper quoted a senior defense official as saying. But he added that Al-Tikriti's claims are also being treated with some skepticism.

"This is a person who is very close to Saddam Hussein, who was for many, many years, and who was part of the lies and deception for so long that you have to be very careful about what he tells you," he told the New York Times.

Al-Tikriti was one of Saddam Hussein's closest aides, frequently at his side and controlling access to the former Iraqi President.