'Saddam had nuclear programme destroyed'

Two top Iraqi scientists, speaking for the first time since the US led invasion, today denied that Saddam Hussein had tried to restart his nuclear weapons programme.

They insisted that the deposed Iraqi dictator’s order to destroy weapons of mass destruction and the means to produce them had been carried out in the summer of 1991.

Jafar Dhia Jafar, the father of Iraq’s nuclear programme, told a conference in the Lebanese capital Beirut that UN inspectors had “reached total conviction” that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons before the US led invasion of Iraq.

“It was clear that reports of the United Nations to the Security Council should have been clear and courageous,” Jafar said. “I believe the United Nations should also investigate the facts that were known before the war and why they (nuclear inspectors) did not declare them to the security council.”

Jafar, who once was an adviser to Saddam as a head of his nuclear programme, spoke mostly on the history and background of Iraq’s nuclear programme as he presented a paper jointly authored with another prominent Iraqi nuclear scientist denying Iraq had reconstituted its pursuit of atomic weapons.

He and Noman Saad Eddin al-Noaimi, a former director-general of Iraq’s nuclear programme, wrote that the former Iraqi leader had ordered the elimination of weapons of mass destruction and means to produce them.

“Saddam Hussein issued orders in July 1991 for the destruction of all banned weapons, in addition to the systems to produce them. It was carried by the Special Republican Guard forces,” the scientists said in their paper.

“We can confirm with absolute certainty that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction after its unilateral destruction of all its components in the summer of 1991, and did not resume any such activity because it no longer had the foundations to resume such activity,” they wrote.

Before the Iraq invasion, Bush administration officials repeatedly raised the prospect of an Iraqi nuclear threat.