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Saddam planned to deploy WMD
07/12/2003 09:57 - (SA)
London - Saddam Hussein deployed weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the US-led war on Iraq which could be used on the battlefield in less than 45 minutes, an Iraqi officer told a British Sunday newspaper.
The informant, identified as Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh, said he believed he was the source of a controversial claim in a British government dossier on Iraq which claimed some of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) could be deployed within 45 minutes.
Dabbagh, who was the head of an Iraqi air defence unit in the western desert, told The Sunday Telegraph that he had provided several reports to British intelligence on Saddam's weapons plans from early 2002.
He said that these included details of how frontline units had been supplied with cases of WMD warheads towards the end of last year.
The devices were made in Iraq and designed to be launched by hand-held rocket-propelled grenades, the Sunday Telegraph said.
"I am the one responsible for providing this information," Dabbagh was quoted as saying. "Forget 45 minutes, we could have fired these within half an hour."
He did not specify whether the warheads contained chemical or biological agents.
He said that he believed the weapons had now been hidden at secret locations by Saddam's Fedayeen militias and were still in Iraq.
The Sunday Telegraph said that Dabbagh had spied for the Iraqi National Accord, a London-based exile group, for several years before the war and was now working as an adviser for the Iraqi Governing Council.
Downing Street refused to comment on the report.
A BBC radio report in May alleged that a British government dossier on Iraq - produced in September 2002 and containing the notable claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in as little as 45 minutes - had been "sexed up".
The subsequent suicide of David Kelly, the British weapons expert who was the source of the BBC report, and a judicial inquiry into his death plunged British Prime Minister Tony Blair into the biggest crisis of his six years in office.
- AFP
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