Iraqi seeks probe of nuclear inspections

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The father of Iraq's nuclear bomb program, speaking publicly for the first time since U.S. forces occupied Baghdad, called Monday for a U.N. probe of what nuclear inspectors knew before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and denied Saddam Hussein had tried to restart his atomic program.

Jafar Dhia Jafar said U.N. inspectors had "reached total conviction" that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons before the U.S.-led invasion yet failed to convey that to the Security Council due to U.S. pressure.

Before and after the U.S.-led invasion last March, U.S. officials have insisted Saddam was developing a nuclear weapons program. Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and his nuclear counterpart Mohamed ElBaradei, however, say their teams found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction or programs to build them in Iraq.

"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 has been living in the United Arab Emirates since slipping out of Iraq to Syria during the war. U.S. officials said last April he had surrendered and was questioned.

On Monday, he addressed a meeting on the repercussions of the occupation of Iraq, organized by the Beirut-based Center for Arab Unity Studies. Before a sympathetic audience of intellectuals and Arab nationalists, he presented a paper co-written with Noman Saad Eddin al-Noaimi, a former director-general of Iraq's nuclear program.

In it, the scientists describe the history of Iraq's nuclear program, detailing how Saddam developed a covert atomic program after Israel's 1981 airstrike destroyed nuclear facilities near Baghdad.

By the end of 1990 "encouraging results" had been achieved by in uranium enrichment programs and in studies and designs of nuclear weapons, the scientists wrote, but those activities stopped when Iraq's nuclear facilities were destroyed or damaged during the 1991 Gulf War.

"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 out by the Special Republican Guard forces," they wrote.

"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."