Such tapes, along with images of victims of Shi’ite militias and unflattering coverage of Shi’ite leaders, are beaming across Iraq and much of the Middle East 24 hours a day, broadcast by a banned Iraqi satellite television station that has become a major information center for the Sunni insurgency— and the focus of a cat-and-mouse hunt that has exasperated and infuriated American and Iraqi forces.

Making the situation even more galling for the authorities, US and Iraqi officials say that money stolen from the US probably helps pay for the station. “They do not have programmes but buffoonery, blaspheming and support for terrorism,” said Jalal al-Din al-Sagheer, a senior member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shi’ite party. “The source of funding for the channel is theft.”

The channel’s founder, Meshaan al-Juburi, is a former Sunni member of Parliament who was indicted last February on charges of embezzling millions of dollars meant to pay for a vast pipeline protection force he had been assigned to help build. He was accused of collecting salaries for thousands of soldiers who did not exist. He denied the charges and fled to Syria.

But the American and Iraqi officials said he funneled some of the money to Sunni insurgents, and they suspect much of it helped him shift the programming on his channel, Al Zawra (“the gate” in Arabic), from popular music videos and dance shows to gruesome scenes.

Iraqi officials said Juburi made the switch to irritate his critics, and to try and buy himself protection from prosecution. “He started showing the insurgency videos just to be close to the resistance,” said Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab and speaker of Parliament.

Iraqi officials banned the station on November 5, focusing on its anti-Shi’ite footage and accusing it of “agitating the people against a large Iraqi sect with killing and genocide.” Since then, the station has become a pirate outfit, fleeing makeshift headquarters at least twice.

Some top American military officials say they have aggressively tried to find where the broadcasts originate to put an end to them, but so far they have failed.

-MARC SANTORA & DAMIEN CAVE