Iraq 'resumed' work on nuclear bomb

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, DEC. 24.In what is seen as a plug for the anti-Iraqi lobby which is trying hard to resist international pressure to lift U.N. sanctions against Baghdad, The Sunday Times today reported that Iraq had `resumed' work on producing a nuclear bomb. It sourced the story to a junior Iraqi scientist who defected to Jordan after being allegedly tortured for refusing to cooperate with the authorities in Baghdad.

The report said that Mr. Salman Yassin Zweir, a 39- year-old design engineer who worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, was being `debriefed' by American intelligence officials in Amman. He is reported to have told his interlocutors that the nuclear programme was revived in August 1998, four months before the President, Mr. Saddam Hussein, expelled the U.N. weapons inspectors. The programme had been suspended after the U.N. intervention following the 1991 Gulf War.

The timing of the report has raised questions about its motives. It is being asked why Mr. Zweir who `escaped' from Iraq two years ago chose to spoke out precisely at a time when the world opinion is growing increasingly against the sanctions.

The perception that the `disclosure' was aimed at shoring up the sanctions against Iraq is reinforced by the emphasis in The Sunday Times report on recalling the future U.S. Secretary of State, Gen. Collin Powell's statement that he would resist pressures to revoke the sanctions until Iraq accounted fully for all weapons of mass destruction. ``We're doing this to protect the people of the region...who would be targets if we did not contain (the weapons) and eliminate them,'' he had said last week, the paper recalled.

Significantly, it also speculated that the information provided by Mr. Zweir would ``raise international concern that Saddam is intent on developing weapons of mass destruction''. In another give-away comment, the report said that Gen. Powell was `` expected to use the threat to press the case in Europe for America's so-called son of star wars National Missile Defence system''. The Amman-based story had the U.S. `briefing' written all over it, though it also quoted an unnamed senior Western diplomat as saying that ``this is the first concrete evidence of what we feared might be happening''.

Mr. Zweir is reported to have said that when he refused to cooperate with what he thought was a `filthy act', he was arrested and tortured. ``He was beaten with iron bars for three weeks. After losing consciousness and following the intervention of a hospital employee who knew his family he was smuggled to a farm in southern Iraq and led to Jordan in October 1998,'' the report said.

Mr. Zweir is described as a `member of Iraq's scientific elite' who was well looked after by the Government, his salary being twice as much as that of an `average' Iraqi government official.

The report has few details about the `resumed' programme, except that the ``instruction (asking scientists to return to their duties) came in a document marked `top

secret' which identified a research centre on Al-Jadriya Street, Baghdad, as the headquarters of the new operation''.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : International
Previous : Mahathir vows to check political violence
Next     : What's cooking at Whitehall?