Pressing him, a reporter asked, "Does that mean he is in custody?"

"No comment," the minister repeated.

The rumors about al-Zarqawi followed an interview aired on an Arab television station earlier this month in which a Saudi man arrested for a deadly truck bombing claimed that he heard from other insurgents that al-Zarqawi had been arrested by Iraqi police in Fallujah but released because authorities didn't recognize him.

Rumors spread that Iraqi authorities had al-Zarqawi in custody but were waiting to announce it just before the Jan. 30 elections.

Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Iraq's al-Qaida affiliate, has claimed responsibility for numerous kidnappings and the beheadings of several foreigners, including Americans. His group, al-Qaida in Iraq, has also carried out many other bombing and shooting attacks on American troops and Iraqi police and soldiers.

In an audiotape posted Thursday on the Web, a speaker who identified himself as al-Zarqawi called on his followers to prepare for a long struggle against the Americans and denounced Iraqi Shiites for fighting alongside U.S. troops in last November's assault on the rebel stronghold of Fallujah.

The United States has offered a $25 million reward for al-Zarqawi's capture or death - the same amount as for Osama bin Laden.

Earlier on Saturday, an Iraqi insurgent group said in a Web statement that it had killed 15 Iraqi National Guard members seized this month off a bus northwest of Baghdad.

"After the investigation, they confessed to the crimes they have committed with the crusader forces against civilians and mujahedeen," the Ansar al-Sunnah group said in the statement. "With God's help, God's verdict has been carried out against them by shooting them. ... They should be a lesson to others."

The claim could not be independently verified, and the statement contained no photographs. Iraqi insurgents have targeted Iraqi military and security forces because they are less trained, less equipped and less protected than American and other multinational troops.

The Iraqi guardsmen were pulled from a bus Friday near their base in the town of Hit, 140 kilometers (90 miles) northwest of Baghdad. A statement posted the following day on an Islamic Web site took responsibility on behalf of Ansar al-Sunnah.

Ansar al-Sunnah is among Iraq's most aggressive insurgent groups, claiming attacks including a December suicide bombing that killed 22 people, most of them Americans, at a U.S. military mess tent at the northern city of Mosul.

The group is also blamed in the August executions of 12 Nepalese construction workers and twin suicide bombings in February that killed 109 members of Iraq's assertive Kurd minority.

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Editor's note: