Baghdad, Iraq ? Iraqi authorities claimed on Sunday to have captured Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the most-wanted member of Saddam Hussein’s ousted dictatorship, but there was confusion about the report as the Iraqi defense minister said word of his arrest was “baseless.”

There have been incorrect reports of al-Douri’s arrest in the past as U.S. and Iraqi forces hunt for the man who was once one of Saddam’s most senior deputies. Sunday’s report centered on a raid near al-Douri’s hometown of Adwar, north of Baghdad.

Iraq’s top information official told The Associated Press that al-Douri was seized while receiving medical treatment at a clinic near Adwar and that DNA tests were under way to confirm his identity. Al-Douri reportedly suffers from leukemia and needs blood transfusions.

“We are sure he is Izzat Ibrahim,” information official Ibrahim Janabi said. “He was arrested in a clinic in Makhoul near Tikrit and Adwar, and 60 percent of the DNA test has finished.”

A Defense Ministry spokesman, Saleh Sarhan, also told the U.S.-funded Alhurra television station that al-Douri had been captured.

Later, however, the Iraqi defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, said in an interview with Lebanon’s Al Hayat-LBC television that reports that Izzat Ibrahim was captured were “baseless.”

“We don’t have any information on this subject or on the reports that allegedly came out from the defense ministry,” he said.

Al-Douri, once the vice chairman of the Baath Party’s Revolutionary Command Council, is the most prominent member of Saddam’s inner circle who had not been captured or killed. U.S. military officials believe he played an organizing role in the 16-month-old insurgency.

He is No. 6 on the U.S. military’s list of 55 most-wanted figures from Saddam’s regime — the king of clubs in the deck of cards — and U.S. forces have offered a $10 million bounty for his arrest. Forty-four of the people on the list already have been killed or captured.