July 17, 2002	Wednesday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 6, 1423

LONDON, July 16: Proof linking Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq with terrorist groups is needed before the United States or Britain can move to topple him, a former Iraqi weapons inspector for the United Nations said Tuesday.

“If someone can make a case based on substantive fact that Saddam Hussein’s regime is in cahoots with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or any other anti-American, Islamic terrorist organisation then Iraq poses a threat,” Scott Ritter told Sky television.

“This case has not been made,” said the former UN weapons inspector.

“If you’re going to link Saddam with terrorist organisations, there must be hard fact and to date no hard fact has been presented,” he added.

Ritter said that if Washington could come up with the data showing the link between Hussein’s regime and weapons of mass destruction then he would stop saying what he knew about the extent to which Iraq had disarmed before April 1998.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Tuesday that the threat posed by Iraq’s policy on weapons of mass destruction was “growing, not diminishing”.

He said the Sept 11 attacks on the United States demonstrated the importance of acting against emerging threats.

“What we should learn from that is that if there is a gathering threat or danger, let us deal with it before it materializes rather than afterwards,” he added.

The former US marine resigned as head of the UN Special Commission in 1998—AFP