UN team 'acted like Mafia', says Iraqi scientist

An angry Iraqi scientist accused UN weapons inspectors yesterday of using his wife's illness in a "Mafia-like" attempt to lure him abroad for interrogation about Baghdad's nuclear programmes. "Never, never will I leave my country," he said.

Faleh Hassan, a physicist who received his doctorate at Edinburgh University, was one of two scientists whose homes were visited on Thursday by inspectors. It was the first unannounced visit to private residences as the US increased pressure on the UN teams to try to take scientists abroad for questioning about possible prohibited weapons-building by the Iraqis.

Speaking yesterday about the visit, Dr Hassan said he had not been at home when the inspectors arrived, but that his wife's high blood pressure had worsened when she discovered the inspectors and their cars around the house. He returned later and took the experts to a field outside Baghdad. Journalists watched them jointly examining what appeared to be a man-made mound, whose significance was unclear. A senior Iraqi official said later that the field was part of a farm Dr Hassan sold in 1996.

The 55-year-old physicist, once associated with Iraq's nuclear programme, said that during the visit, when an accompanying Iraqi official briefly left his side, a female UN inspector offered to arrange for him to leave Iraq as an "escort" for his ailing wife, for whom treatment would be arranged for kidney stones, diabetes and high blood pressure.

Dr Hassan said he refused the offer, calling it "Mafia-like behaviour". He said he would not leave even if instructed to do so by his government.

Earlier on Thursday Dr Hassan, director of the Al-Razi military industrial site, emerged from his home after a six-hour UN search, carrying a box packed with documents. After the trip to the field, he, the UN team and Iraqi officials went to a Baghdad hotel, where the inspectors intended to photocopy the material. There, he said, they tried to renege on a commitment to give him copies, and he stood his ground until after dawn. Finally, they relented and returned copies to him.

He called them "old documents, not worth photocopying", but yesterday the head of the International Atomic Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said they appeared to be related to laser enrichment.

Under a tough new UN sanctions regime, inspectors are allowed to speak to Iraqi scientists in private and even take them outside the country for interviews – which Washington hopes will prompt them to reveal hidden arms programmes.(AP)