Insider Gives Un Details of Iraq Arms

An Iraqi scientist interviewed by UN inspectors has given details of a military programme suspected of being part of a secret effort to build a nuclear weapon, a UN spokesman said yesterday.

The spokesman, Hiro Ueki, said the scientist was a metallurgist from an important Iraqi state company. Mr Ueki did not give details of the military programme involved, nor did he say whether the scientist's testimony was evidence for or against the existence of a nuclear weapons project.

However, the Iraqi foreign ministry issued a statement naming the scientist as Kathim Jamil, a specialist in the use of aluminium tubes in making short-range missiles. He appeared on Iraqi television to deny participation in any weapons programme.

The US has accused Iraq of importing aluminium tubes to construct centrifuges used in the enrichment of uranium for a clandestine project to build a nuclear weapon. But the Iraqi government has insisted they are intended for short-range missiles, permitted under international sanctions.

The Iraqi statement yesterday implied that Mr Jamil had corroborated Baghdad's version of the aluminium tube controversy. It pointed out that the interview had been carried out in al-Rasheed hotel in Baghdad, in the presence of a government official.

Clearly choosing his words carefully, Mr Ueki said only that the metallurgist had provided "technical details of a military programme" that had "attracted considerable attention as a possible prelude to a clandestine nuclear programme".

His testimony, Mr Ueki said, "will be of great use in completing the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) assessment" of Iraq's nuclear programme.

The UN's weapons inspectors are due to complete an initial report in a month's time, which will be scrutinised for evidence of Iraqi weapons programmes and could be a trigger for a US-led invasion.

The US has already declared Iraq to be in "material breach" of its UN obligations for failing to own up to its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in an official statement to the UN earlier this month.

The interview with the Iraqi metallurgist was conducted under a UN resolution passed in November giving weapons inspectors the right to question anyone they suspect of involvement in banned weapons programmes.

The US has put considerable pressure on the weapons inspectors to transport Iraqi scientists and their families outside Iraq for questioning, seeing it as the quickest means to prove that Baghdad is lying in its insistence that it is not developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

It also emerged yesterday that, even while negotiations were under way with Iraq last summer over the resumption of UN inspections, Washington had already launched an aggressive campaign to persuade Iraqi scientists to defect.

The first and most important target was Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, one of the founding scientists behind Iraq's attempt to build a nuclear bomb before the Gulf war. According to a UN official, Mr Jaffar was questioned for several hours at the US embassy in Amman, Jordan, where an Iraqi delegation to the UN in New York had come for visas.

The rest of the delegation was allowed to travel on to New York on May 1 for talks about the resumption of UN weapons inspections, but Mr Jaffar only caught up with them the next day. Iraqi diplomats later told UN officials that he had been offered money to defect.