Saddam got sand

2003-06-05 21:04

Pretoria - The man who headed South Africa's chemical and biological warfare programme in apartheid days declared on Thursday that Saddam Hussein was "hoodwinked by criminals" who delivered containers filled with sand when he tried to rebuild Iraq's arsenal.

Wouter Basson told the Pretoria Press Club that Saddam's "reasonable arsenal" was destroyed in the first Gulf War in 1991, the SAPA news agency reported.

"Afterwards he tried to rebuild that," Basson said. "We picked up orders and requests he was sending out all over the world for raw materials, but the sanctions were so tight on him that he was really hoodwinked by a lot of criminals.

"Ingredients, chemicals, constituents and electronics that he ordered and paid for never cropped up.

"There were containers full of sand offloaded, and I think ultimately they just gave up and realised under their circumstances it is not going to work for them."

Basson was acquitted by the Pretoria High Court last year on 46 charges ranging from fraud and theft to drug trafficking and murder.

He said he had no doubt that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

"It (weapons of mass destruction) is a term that was coined by politicians who wanted to attack Iraq, to get a stick to hit Iraq," he declared, adding that chemical and biological arms did not qualify as weapons of mass destruction - "they are not suited to that term."

- AFX