New Zealand expelling former Iraqi minister

New Zealand said today it is expelling a former Iraqi Cabinet minister because he was responsible for chemical weapons production under ousted President Saddam Hussein.

The government revoked the visa of former Iraqi Agriculture and Agrarian Reform Minister Amer Mahdi Al-Khashali on Wednesday after he had been in the country for more than a month – without the government having been aware that he was a minister in a Saddam Cabinet in the early 1980s.