Howard Lied to Voters, Says Aide

The Australian prime minister, John Howard, has been accused of deceiving the public over a claim that refugees had endangered their children's lives by throwing them overboard in front of coastguards.

Mr Howard made the allegation during the last days of the 2001 election as the main parties argued over border security.

A former senior adviser to Australia's defence minister has now come forward and said he told Mr Howard on three occasions that the story of refugees throwing children into the water was untrue.

Mike Scrafton's claims were seized upon by the Labor opposition leader, Mark Latham, who said he would demand the reopening of an inquiry into the incident.

"Mr Howard has been badly caught out and shown that he's not fit to hold the high office of prime minister in this country," he said.

The so-called "children overboard" affair was a battleground of the 2001 election campaign, which Mr Howard is widely considered to have won because of the opposition's perceived weakness on border security.

Just over a month before the election, a single confused report from one coastguard boat led to claims that refugees had been throwing their children into the sea so that coastguard officers would be forced to rescue them and accept them as asylum seekers.

Photographs of the purported incident sent to newspapers later turned out to have been pictures of coastguards saving passengers after a boat, dubbed the Siev-4, sank while it was being towed.