London Sunday Times February 9, 2003 Saddam in secret chemical raids Jon Swain, Ahwaz, Iran
IRAQI forces attacked a Marsh Arabs' village with chemical weapons in 1998, several years after Saddam Hussein assured the United Nations he no longer had weapons of mass destruction, it was claimed yesterday. Baroness Nicholson, a senior MEP, said she would present evidence of the attack to Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, this week. She said it was a significant development because it further exposed Saddam as a liar. "Not only has he hung on to his weapons of mass destruction; this shows he has continued to use chemical weapons as recently as 1998, soon after the last lot of UN weapons inspectors had left Iraq, in his extermination programme against the Marsh Arabs," she said. Nicholson is the vice-president of the European parliament's foreign affairs committee, its investigator on Iraq and an advocate of human rights in the country. She also founded the Amar appeal, a humanitarian agency set up to help people forced to leave their historic marshlands in southern Iraq. She will tell Blix of the evidence she has collected of two chemical attacks when she returns from a visit to Marsh Arab refugee camps in Iran. The Iranians are preparing extra refugee camps and expect up to 200,000 Iraqis to flee in the event of war. Nicholson claims the first chemical attack was in 1992, early on in Saddam's campaign to wipe out the people of the marshes. Since then he has built an intricate system of dams and dykes to depopulate the marshlands. Today they have largely dried up, obliterating the inhabitants' way of life and turning many into refugees in Iran. A helicopter flew over the village of Eligdur and dropped "three parcels", Nicholson's report says. Seven people died suddenly three hours later. After death they bled from their mouths and noses, and their skin turned dark blue. Many other people were injured and the villagers were afraid to go near the bodies because they did not know what had happened. They had not heard of chemical weapons. In the 1998 attack material was again dropped from a helicopter onto a village in the Gandaleh area. "People died in an extraordinary way," said Nicholson. "I am sure that there is more to discover. I shall put these two new cases immediately to Blix. I anticipate having more information, possibly this week." Last week, at a private meeting in New York, Nicholson handed Blix what she believes is evidence of two sites where Iraq has hidden material used to make chemical and biological weapons. She gave him specific street and house details where her informant told her the material was stored. She named one informant but said she had others names "in reserve". These would be given to Blix following assurances he would protect these sources. She also gave him an order form, which she believes is valid, showing the Iraqi government was buying engineering equipment including "formulated tubing" from China that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction. The order form was dated 2002 from Baghdad but it reached the Chinese supplier last month.
