Saddam Hussein's senior bodyguard, one of the few people the former Iraqi leader trusted completely and a witness of potentially enormous importance, has been captured in Iraq, American military officials said today.

The bodyguard, Gen. Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, ranked as the No. 4 most-wanted Iraqi and dubbed the "ace of diamonds" in the American military's playing card-style "top 55 list," was captured on Monday, the United States Central Command said.

The announcement by Central Command, which has overall charge of the military campaign in Iraq, gave no details of the capture. Nor did it say whether General Mahmud, whose official title was presidential secretary, was cooperating with interrogators.

The military also announced that American forces raided two farmhouses near Tikrit today, seizing about 50 former members of Iraq's Special Security Forces and Special Republican Guard and a stash of cash and jewels that a senior Army commander said was being used, at least in part, to pay for bounties to kill American soldiers.

In the early-morning raids, the American troops seized more than $8.5 million in American dollars, jewels valued at more than $1 million, and large amounts of euros, British pounds sterling and Iraqi dinars, officials said. Troops later seized a vehicle leaving the scene that was carrying more than $800,000 in cash.

The announcements came on the same day that an American soldier was killed and another was wounded in a drive-by shooting in central Baghdad, the latest in a series of assaults on the United States military.

General Mahmud's capture comes at a crucial time, as the war in Iraq and postwar reconstruction emerge as hot political issues on Capitol Hill.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are testifying today before the House Armed Services Committee on United States commitments in Iraq. And some Democratic lawmakers have continued to question whether the Bush administration made an adequate case for going to war, particularly in its citing of evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Some military and intelligence officials believe that if anyone knows the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein himself, and the whereabouts of any Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, it would be General Mahmud.

There have been no confirmed sightings of Mr. Hussein alive in many weeks. The American-led military tried at least twice to kill him by airstrikes during the Iraq invasion, and the rubble from those raids is still being sifted for evidence of his remains.

Although General Mahmud is No. 4 on the most-wanted list, he is thought to have been third in power in the Baghdad regime - behind only Mr. Hussein and his son Qusay.

One opinion of the general's stature was given by the onetime Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, who recently reflected on the hunt for Saddam Hussein and whether he might be in hiding with his sons.

"He is not traveling with Uday or Qusay," Mr. Chalabi said. Rather, Mr. Chalabi surmised, the deposed dictator - if still alive - would be traveling with General Mahmud.

Steven Emerson, an expert on Middle East terrorism, offered another perspective on the general in an April 24 interview on MSNBC, shortly after the attempts to kill Mr. Hussein.

"This is a guy that really knew exactly where entire operational secrecy was for Saddam Hussein, where the palaces were, where the bunkers were, where his hideouts were, where exactly he would go in case there was an attack," Mr. Emerson said. "He was the No. 1 bodyguard, if you so will, even though he didn't like that title, and he would be responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein 24 hours a day. If he got any word that there was going to be an attack, he would wake him up 15 minutes before, oust him and bring him to someplace else."

If the general can indeed provide intelligence on the status of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the lack of them, his words could have a huge impact in Washington, and perhaps on international opinion, since the Bush administration cited the presumed existence of such weapons as a central justification for going to war.

The chief White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, termed the arrest of General Mahmud a "significant capture." But when a reporter asked him if it was "a potential boon in your so far fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Fleischer dismissed the term "fruitless" as "a throwaway line" and said that the hunt for weapons had been "a very careful search." and that mobile laboratories found in Iraq could have been used to make biological weapons.

General Mahmud, whose name has been rendered from the Arabic in several ways, is a distant cousin of Saddam Hussein. The name Tikriti comes from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, near Baghdad. While Saddam Hussein was in power, he was a familiar, if somewhat bland, figure almost always seen standing to the rear of Mr. Hussein during the leader's orchestrated news appearances.

General Mahmud will probably face charges himself. United States officials have said they want to try him for war crimes or crimes against humanity for his activities within the Hussein leadership.

Discussing the seizure of money and gems today, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, told reporters at the Pentagon in a video conference from Baghdad that American forces continued to face resistance from former Baath Party loyalists, Islamic fundamentalists and "poor Iraqis" who are being paid bounties to kill American troops. "They're being paid by ex-Baath Party loyalists, who are paying people to kill Americans," he said.

But General Odierno repeatedly said that attacks on American forces in his sector, a swath of territory the size of West Virginia that stretches north of Baghdad to Kirkuk, and then east to the Iranian order, were uncoordinated strikes by groups of three to five fighters that he viewed as acts of increasing desperation.

In Baghdad today, a United States military spokesman said, attackers fired on soldiers from the First Armored Division from a passing vehicle, killing one soldier and injuring another. On Tuesday, a soldier from the same division died after being shot in the back by a sniper while on patrol in northern Baghdad.

Today's incident brings the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since major combat was declared over on May 1 to at least 42. It is also the 12th fatal attack on the American military in the last three weeks.

The attack came after an American soldier fired into a crowd of protesters at the gates of a palace in Baghdad this morning, killing two Iraqis. Americans from the First Armored Division fired warning shots after the protesters threw rocks at a convoy trying to enter the palace.

The convoy passed through the crowd, made up of former Iraqi Army officers and soldiers protesting their lack of pay since coalition forces disbanded the army.

General Odierno said he was not surprised by the recent attacks on American forces - many of them deadly - especially as the armed sweeps have increased. "We're dealing with people who have everything to lose and nothing to gain," he said.

But the general asserted that it was an overstatement to call the resistance guerrilla attacks.

"It is not close to guerrilla warfare because it's not coordinated, it's not organized, and it's not led," he said. "The soldiers that are conducting these operations don't even have the willpower. We find that a majority of the time they'll fire a shot, and they'll drop the weapon and they'll give up right away. They do not have the will."

General Odierno said there were some foreign fighters Syrians and Iranians among the prisoners taken recently, but that his cavalry forces had effectively sealed the Iraqi border with Iran to keep out any fighters from infiltrating from there.

"We have shut the border down and there is a lot less individuals being able to come into Iraq," he said.

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