US TV documentary to unmask Iraqi weapons expert as a fraud

A television documentary has been successful in unmasking an Iraqi defector who claimed that Saddam Husseins biological warfare capabilities were central to the US governments case for the 2003 invasion.

London, Nov.3 : A television documentary has been successful in unmasking an Iraqi defector who claimed that Saddam Hussein's biological warfare capabilities were central to the US government's case for the 2003 invasion.

The informer, codenamed Curveball, was Rafid Ahmed Alwan who, in 1999, turned up at a refugee centre in Germany seeking political asylum.

Alwan claimed to have been a highly regarded chemical engineer working on the production of mobile biological weapons at a plant in Djerf al-Nadaf.

Senior officials in the German intelligence service, the BND, who wrote to the CIA warning his account was vague, second-hand and impossible to check, discredited curveball's claims in 2002. They also thought he was psychologically unstable.

According to The Independent, his role in the build-up to the war was exposed in a detailed investigation by the Los Angeles Times, in which he was dismissed as an "out-and-out" fabricator who should have aroused scepticism in the CIA.

The LA Times said Curveball was the brother of a senior aide to Ahmed Chalabi, then leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and reported that neither the Pentagon nor the CIA knew exactly who he was.

Alwan is named for the first time in an edition of the US network CBS's documentary 60 Minutes to be broadcast tomorrow. The report is already on the programme's web pages. The documentary assumes he is still living in Germany, under a false name.

ANI