Baghdad scorns `proof' of nerve gas

IRAQ IS categorically denying that it ever produced VX gas capable of being used in a missile warhead, while the United States says that its laboratory tests show traces of VX poison gas present at a site where Iraq destroyed missiles.

The revelations about the VX are evidently the first shots in a propaganda battle waged by the US to persuade the United Nations Security Council to continue with sanctions on Baghdad when they come up for review in October.

"If this finding is borne out, it will mean the UN Special Commission [on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction] has found evidence that the Iraqis were not telling the truth," a Pentagon spokesman said.

Iraq admits experimenting with VX before the Gulf war, but says the tests failed and it never put the gas in a weapon. Baghdad says that if sanctions are not lifted it will pursue "an alternative strategy".

"This is not a new discovery," Colonel Terry Taylor, a former UN weapons inspector now at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, was quoted as saying yesterday. "This is old news, but it is a way of bringing to the fore realities that have been glossed over."

At the weekend, a report from a US army laboratory on missile fragments was leaked to the American press by an Iraqi opposition group called the Iraqi National Congress. It said pieces of missile from a site at Taji, just north of Baghdad, analysed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, had produced significant amounts of VX disulphide and stabiliser to allow the VX to be placed in a missile.

But the report is peculiar, as the INC, once a powerful umbrella group for the Iraqi opposition, no longer really exists. Jalal al-Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which is nominally one of the few remaining members of the INC, told The Independent that the group is moribund.

The leaking of the story about VX is likely to anger members of the Security Council opposed to sanctions. The council met yesterday to discuss the latest visit of Richard Butler, head of the UN special team monitoring the elimination of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

In the past, France, Russia and China have complained of leaks of information about which they have not been informed. Iraq is demanding that the tests conducted in the US be repeated in laboratories in neutral countries.

The US may wish to counterbalance recent remarks made by Mr Butler during a visit to Baghdad that progress was being made in certifying that Iraq has eliminated its strategic weapons.

Washington wants to return to a position where the burden of proof was on Iraq to prove it had done away with its weapons, rather than on the UN inspection team to produce evidence that Iraq still possessed such weaponry.

Washington is concerned that during the confrontation with Iraq in February, international support for sanctions was undermined by the realisation that the main victims of sanctions are ordinary Iraqis. Mortality among children under the age of one has tripled since 1989, according to the World Health Organisation.

But Iraq does not have many options. If it expels UN weapons inspectors it may simply prolong sanctions. It needs to show France, Russia and China, its potential supporters in the Security Council, that it is doing its best to co-operate with the UN.

Washington showed in February that it did not want to restart the Gulf war by bombing Iraq. It discovered that the failure to produce an Israeli- Palestinian agreement was eroding its influence among Arab states. US officials have since said privately that they will do everything to maintain sanctions, though they will be more flexible in allowing Iraq to spend money for humanitarian and development needs.