Downing Street accused of dossier plagiarism

The Government was accused last night of plagiarising sections of an intelligence dossier on Iraq from a postgraduate student.

Channel 4 News reported that paragraphs had been lifted from an article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last year by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a student from Monterey, California.

The analysis, published on the Downing Street website, was called Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment Deception and Intimidation.

Glen Rangwala, an academic at Cambridge University, had spotted the student's work because passages containing typographical errors were repeated in the dossier, Channel 4 said.

The document was cited by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, in his address to the UN on Wednesday. A Downing Street statement said the report was accurate and that it had not claimed "exclusivity".