Niger: Straw accused of 'new deception'

Jack Straw stood accused of misleading the public over the threat from Iraq last night after he cited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear bomb without saying it was 12 years old.

Labour MPs claimed the Foreign Secretary had resorted to desperate tactics after he referred to Mahdi Obeidi, an Iraqi scientist, who has handed parts needed to build a gas centrifuge system that enriches uranium to American officials. What Mr Straw did not say was that Mr Obeidi had buried the parts ­ and documents about the programme ­ in his garden as long ago as 1991.

Mr Straw was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme about the controversy over the Government's claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, from which the United States has distanced itself in recent days. The Foreign Secretary said: "One of the things that has happened since the fall of Baghdad has been the discovery in Baghdad of technical documentation and centrifugal parts which are necessary in the enrichment of uranium, which were buried at the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist in Baghdad. People don't bury technical documents, still less parts of centrifuges, unless they have a purpose in doing so.

"It is difficult to believe there was any purpose in doing such a thing except the preparations were being made for further development of a nuclear programme."

The discovery of the parts and documents is the only success announced to date of the Iraqi Survey Group, which is searching for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Straw did not point out that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said the buried materials were not a "smoking gun" because they related to a pre-1991 nuclear weapons programme and appeared to confirm that no attempt had been made to restart it since the 1991 Gulf War. Labour MPs reacted angrily to Mr Straw's interview. Alice Mahon, MP for Halifax, said: "This is old stuff which the Government cannot be allowed to get away with. It is an attempt to mislead. It will not do."

Tony Lloyd, a former Foreign Office minister, said: "The public really wants to see an end to this scraping of the very bottom of the barrel. If there was a real, current programme that justified the war, let's see the real evidence and not simply a rehashing of yesterday's news."

A Foreign Office spokesman denied Mr Straw had made misleading remarks, insisting he was referring to a recent interview by Mr Obeidi but had not said the parts discovered were new.Asked about the timescale, the spokesman said: "We are still assessing the information that came from this scientist."

Tony Blair is under pressure to make a full statement before the Commons rises for its summer break on Thursday on "the Niger connection" and the failure to find WMD. Today, Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, will call for an emergency statement by the Prime Minister.

In a letter to Mr Blair last night, he demanded an independent inquiry, headed by a judge, to investigate the Government's handling of intelligence material before the war. Mr Kennedy said the case for an inquiry had grown stronger in recent days because the White House had "disowned" Britain's claim about Niger, and because of comments by Hans Blix, the UN's former chief weapons inspector, who told The Independent on Sunday that the Government had "over-interpreted" evidence of Iraq's WMD capability.

The Government admitted last night that some of the documents submitted to the IAEA on Iraq's attempts to buy uranium were fake. Bill Rammell, a Foreign Office minister, said in a written Commons reply: "We have now seen the documents passed to the IAEA and agree that some of them are forgeries. Others are still under consideration."

The Government insisted that it had separate evidence from other intelligence services, which it could not pass on to the IAEA because it was not British. Mr Straw said he hoped and believed discussions were now taking place to see whether that evidence could be handed over. Diplomatic sources categorically denied reports yesterday that France had supplied intelligence to Britain about purported Iraqi attempts to smuggle uranium from Niger.

Although France handed some raw intelligence to the IAEA, Paris had little faith in it and it was dismissed by the IAEA.

Mr Blair said at the end of a summit of centre-left leaders in Surrey that "we should be proud as a country of what we have done".

Asked whether he stood 100 per cent behind the Government's claim about "the Niger connection," he said: "We stand entirely by the intelligence that we gave and shared with the public. Nobody was in any doubt at all or is in any doubt about the security threat Saddam posed. There may be many ways of dealing with it, but the whole of the United Nations declared him a security threat."