(Updates with U.S. military spokesman, paragraphs 13, 14, 18) By Paul Holmes and Mariam Karouny BAGHDAD, Oct 26 (Reuters) - Iraq's most notorious death squad leader escaped a major U.S.-led raid on a Shi'ite Muslim militia stronghold in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Thursday. In an interview with Reuters, Maliki said Wednesday's ground and air assault on the sprawling Sadr City slum targeted Abu Deraa, a feared warlord held responsible for a rash of brutal sectarian killings and kidnappings of Iraqi Sunnis. The operation, carried out by Iraqi special forces with U.S. advisers and air support, killed 10 "enemy fighters", according to a U.S. military statement. Maliki said he backed the raid but complained that it was conducted in a heavy handed way that could wreck a political deal he had worked on with Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical anti- American cleric who controls the Mehdi Army Shi'ite militia. "I said we agree on arresting wanted criminals and we do not care whether they are Sunnis or Shi'ites, but that was not an arrest operation," said Maliki, who is himself a Shi'ite. "Do you send in planes to arrest one person?" he asked. Maliki had appeared to disavow the raid on Wednesday, saying he had not been consulted, but he told Reuters his problem was with the way it had been combined with the hunt for an American soldier kidnapped on Monday. "We knew about the first part but they did not tell us about the second part," Maliki said. Deraa, sometimes dubbed "The Shi'ite Zarqawi" after slain al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi, is said by U.S. officials to be a renegade Mehdi Army member who is at odds with Sadr. He was the target of a similar raid on July 7. "They did not arrest him in either operation," Maliki said. A U.S. military statement late on Wednesday said Wednesday's operation led to 13 arrests, three of them carried out at a mosque in connection with Monday's abduction of the U.S soldier. The U.S. military had earlier referred only to an operation "to capture a top illegal armed group commander directing widespread death squad activity". U.S. military spokesman Major-General William Caldwell said the raid was among 26 missions conducted in the past 12 days on the basis of intelligence gathered by a special unit set up to target death squads. The missions had yielded 71 arrests. Wednesday's raid was the only one of the 26 to take place in Sadr City and Caldwell said the military was reviewing procedures "to understand why the prime minister, as he states, had not been personally notified." MEHDI ARMY OR NOT? Masked gunmen grabbed the U.S. serviceman at the home of relatives he went to visit in Baghdad after leaving the fortified Green Zone, according to U.S. military officials who have identified him as a linguist of Iraqi descent. Maliki said the soldier's brother was snatched with him but later let go. "The brother who was released said he been abducted by the Mehdi Army but we don't know what Mehdi Army means any more," Maliki said. "We asked the Sadr movement to look for him and they swear they know nothing about him," Maliki said. Sunni insurgents and loyalists of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein sometimes also posed as Mehdi Army fighters in the same black garb, he said. Caldwell would not give any further details on the missing soldier on Thursday but said the search for him continued. Maliki's remarks followed tensions with U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday over political and security measures to stem Iraq's spiralling violence. "You should not harm people in the way you go to arrest people, spreading horror and at the risk of sabotaging political actions we have worked on," Maliki said. Maliki said he had convinced Sadr to issue a statement that banned the Mehdi Army from fighting Iraqi government and U.S.-led forces and outlawed kidnappings and killings. "We support such a position because it will reflect positively on the security situation and we have started talking to them about how to disarm militias," he said. (Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald)
