Saddam had WMDs destroyed in 91, claim scientists

THE row over whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was reignited yesterday, after the former head of the country’s nuclear programme said Saddam Hussein ordered the destruction of the arms and the means to produce them in 1991.

Speaking publicly for the first time since United States forces occupied Baghdad, Jafar Dhia Jafar called for the United Nations to investigate what weapons inspectors knew about Iraq’s banned weapons programme before last year’s invasion.

Speaking at a meeting at the Beirut-based Centre for Arab Unity Studies, Mr Jafar said UN inspectors had "reached total conviction" that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons.

"It was clear that reports of the United Nations [inspectors] to the Security Council should have been clear and courageous," he said. "I believe the United Nations should also investigate the facts that were known before the war and why [the inspectors] did not declare them to the Security Council."

Mr Jafar, who was once an adviser to Saddam as a head of his nuclear programme, was presenting a paper written with Noman Saad Eddin al-Noaimi, a former director-general of Iraq’s nuclear programme, in which the pair denied the country had restarted its pursuit of atomic weapons.

The two men wrote that the former Iraqi leader had ordered the elimination of weapons of mass destruction and the means to produce them.

"Saddam Hussein issued orders in July 1991 for the destruction of all banned weapons, in addition to the systems to produce them. It was carried by the Special Republican Guard forces," the scientists said.

"We can confirm with absolute certainty that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction after its unilateral destruction of all its components in the summer of 1991, and did not resume any such activity because it no longer had the foundations to resume such activity."

US officials repeatedly raised the prospect of an Iraqi nuclear threat before the invasion. Three days before the beginning of the war, Dick Cheney, the US vice- president, said Iraq was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons", even though Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, and his nuclear counterpart, Mohamed El Baradei, had found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction or programmes to build them in Iraq.

Inspectors have yet to find conclusive evidence of weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq.