Former Iraqi scientist says Saddam has bio bombs
Hussain Al Shahristani said the Iraqi president did not have the capacity to deliver a payload of the weapons to distant countries but could pass them to overseas cells of supporters.
“There’s no way they can really find them, unless by pure accident,” Shahristani, a former chief scientific advisor to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, told a briefing organised by an association of foreign journalists in the Philippines.
“They’re hidden deep underground or in a tunnel system,” he claimed.
The scientist who now lives in London after he was jailed for 11 years by Saddam’s regime for refusing to develop banned weapons, said his information came from former colleagues and dissidents who had recently fled Iraq.
“My understanding is the nuclear programme has been, for all practical purposes, dismantled,” he said. “But the programme to produce chemical and biological weapons continued even during the years when the inspectors were in Iraq in the 1990s.”
UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said in a report to the world body’s Security Council last Friday his teams had discovered no banned weapons.
The report was seen as a setback for US and British efforts to get UN endorsement to use military force against Iraq over its alleged failure to get rid of weapons of mass destruction.
Shahristani said he believed Saddam planned to make his last stand in Baghdad in the event of a US-led attack and use the capital’s four million residents as human shields.
“There has even been discussion within his circle to set up what they call a chemical belt around Baghdad using his chemical weapons to entrap the residents of Baghdad inside,” he said.
Shahrastani quoted his informants as saying Saddam was banking on 50,000 to 100,000 soldiers to defend the city, but the scientist doubted they would fight to the last man.
