A claim by the head of the UN Special Commission on Iraq that Iraq had tested chemical and biological agents on prisoners and beagle dogs was denied yesterday by Dr Abdel Amir al-Anbari, the Iraqi ambassador in Paris, writes Michael Jansen. "We made no experiments of this kind," he told The Irish Times.
The specific allegation by Mr Richard Butler that experiments had been conducted on beagles demonstrated it was a "total fabrication". For there are no beagles in Iraq - except, perhaps, a handful cherished by a few Anglophile Iraqis.
"If we wanted to conduct experiments on dogs, we would pick up wild dogs which roam in their thousands on the roadsides, not import expensive foreign breeds," he said.
These emotive allegations, Dr al-Anbari said, could be used as a pretext for military strikes.
Mr Butler's allegations were based on documents found in 1995 by UN inspectors beneath a chicken coop at a farm once owned by Maj Gen Hussein Kamel, the son-in-law of the Iraqi President, Mr Saddam Hussein. Gen Kamel defected to Jordan in August of that year and was murdered on his return to Baghdad a few months later.
The parcel - dubbed the "chicken coop documents" - was said to have contained, inter alia, a single photo of an unknown man bearing open lesions on his arms and several photos of beagles suffering terrible torments from being sprayed, presumably, with instantly effective chemical agents.