Fury as US backs police raid on Chalabi home

Iraq’s governing council has reacted with fury after police backed by American soldiers raided the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi, a prominent politician once groomed by the Pentagon as a possible replacement for Saddam Hussein.

The operation confirmed a growing rift between the United States and the former exile just six weeks before the return of Iraqi sovereignty. Two members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, of which Chalabi is a key member, said they were considering resigning in protest over the raid.

“We are friends of America,” Chalabi told a news conference several hours after he said police woke him up at 10.30am yesterday and entered his bedroom with pistols. “But when America treats its friends in this way, then they are in big trouble.”

Iraqi authorities made several arrests and seized documents and computers. Reporters who visited the offices of Chalabi’s political organisation saw scattered documents on the marble floors, ripped-off cables and overturned furniture.

A portrait of Chalabi hanging on the wall in his home had a bullet hole in the forehead.

US officials deferred questions about the raid to the Iraqis, but said neither Chalabi nor his political group, the Iraqi National Congress, was a target. State department spokesman Richard Boucher said “clearly there were legal and investigative reasons, not political”.

In a statement, Chalabi’s organisation urged the governing council to take “a national and responsible stand toward these provocations”.

Council president Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer said he was ”astonished by what happened” and called an urgent council meeting today to discuss the raids.

An aide to council member Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum said he was considering resigning. And Salama al-Khafaji, a Shiite member, told al-Jazeera television: “I threatened to suspend my membership if there’s no official apology to Dr Ahmad Chalabi.”

Although the US military arranged for Chalabi’s dramatic return to Iraq last year, American officials have recently complained privately that Chalabi was interfering with an inquiry into money skimmed from the United Nations oil-for-food programme, criticising American plans for a transfer of power and cosying up to Iranian hardliners.

The Pentagon recently ended a programme under which it had funnelled millions of dollars over the years to Chalabi’s political organisation.

The €326,300 monthly payments were partly for intelligence passed along by fellow exiles about Saddam’s purported weapons of mass destruction – the Bush administration’s stated rationale for the war.

Chalabi has come under criticism because large stockpiles of these weapons were never found.

The CIA has long been suspicious of information provided by his organisation.

At the news conference, Chalabi said the raids was politically-motivated.

“I have opened up the investigation of the oil-for-food programme which has cast doubt about the integrity of the UN here, which they don’t like,” he said.

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor said yesterday the investigation into the oil-for-food programme, a UN-supervised programme that helped Iraq cope with the effects of sweeping economic sanctions between 1990 and 2003, had “nothing to do with what transpired today”.