Ritter Cries Foul at Sex Arrest 'smear'

Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and an outspoken critic of war in Iraq, yesterday claimed he was the victim of a smear campaign after it emerged that he had been arrested in an internet sex sting in June 2001.

Details of the arrest emerged in a local New York state newspaper last week. Reports said Mr Ritter, 44, had been charged with attempted child endangerment after arranging, in an online chatroom, to meet what he thought was a 16-year-old girlat a Burger King restaurant. The girl turned out to be an undercover policewoman. The case was later dismissed.

Mr Ritter cancelled a trip to Baghdad on Tuesday and has instead been appearing on talk shows to defend his reputation. In an interview with CNN on Wednesday he refused to discuss details of the arrest and attempted to shift the fo cus on to who leaked the story. "The case was dismissed. The file was sealed ... Why did this come up now?" he said.

"I have no way of knowing why this happened. But the effect is obvious. I was supposed to fly to Baghdad on a personal initiative that could have had great ramifications in regards issues of war and peace."

The New York Post said Mr Ritter had been caught in a similar case involving a 14-year-old girl in April 2001 but was not charged.

Mr Ritter, a former US marine, spent seven years as a UN weapons inspector, quitting in 1998. He has since become a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, which he accuses of warmongering.

For the past two years he has maintained that Iraq's stock of biological and chemical weapons is negligible or non-existent and that the country has no capacity to build new ones. He also says a nuclear capability is a distant prospect.