February 6, 2003	Thursday	Zul Hijjah 4,1423

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UNITED NATIONS, Feb 5: US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday issued a virtual indictment of Iraq, telling the UN Security Council to stand behind its resolutions or risk becoming irrelevant.

Stopping short of an ultimatum of war, Mr Powell, in his 90-minute presentation of intelligence material, told the council: “This body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows Iraq to continue to defy its will without responding effectively and immediately.”

He claimed the United States had witness accounts that Iraq possessed mobile bioweapons laboratories.

“(Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction,” Powell said.

Expanding on the “irrefutable” evidence against Iraq, he said Baghdad had defied all calls for it to disarm.

He presented tape recordings, satellite photos and statements from informants to support his statement.

The council members, joined by Iraq’s UN ambassador, sat around a large table with Powell and listened attentively.

Of the 15 council members, only the United States and Britain have voiced support for an invasion of Iraq.

Iraq’s ambassador, Mr Mohammed al Douri, was invited to take a seat at the large circular table to listen to the US secretary of state’s presentation and to make remarks afterward.

As he headed into the chamber, he was asked what message he would be delivering. “It’s a message for peace,” Al Douri said.

President Saddam, in an interview broadcast in London on Tuesday, denied his government had a relationship with the Al Qaeda or had weapons of mass destruction.

In his speech Mr Powell asserted that Iraq “bulldozed and graded to conceal chemical weapons evidence” at the Al Musayyib chemical complex last year, and had a series of cargo vehicles and a decontamination vehicle moving around at the site.

Accusing the Iraqi government of having links with the Al Qaeda, Powell told the council that members of the network had been operating freely in Iraq for more than eight months, and were using Baghdad to coordinate their activities.

He said the Al Qaeda’s network in Iraq was headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, an aide to Osama bin Laden who sought refuge in that country after escaping from Afghanistan.

The Jordanian government has implicated Mr Zarqawi in the assassination of a US diplomat in October. He has also been named in the plot to make ricin poison that was unearthed in London last month. He is connected with the Ansar-ul-Islam, a Taliban-style group that operates in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq.

The alleged link between Iraq and the Al Qaeda was part of the highly anticipated presentation laying out what Mr Powell said was evidence that Iraq was developing biological and chemical weapons, and was attempting to obtain nuclear weapons.

China’s foreign minister told the security council that it should allow UN arms inspectors in Iraq to carry on with their work.

“We should respect the views of the two [UN inspection) agencies and support the continuation of their work,” Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan said in his remarks after hearing the US secretary of state present Washington’s case.

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency “have been working very hard (and) it is their view that now they are not in a position to draw conclusions”, he said.

Agencies add: Colin Powell accused President Saddam Hussein of showing nothing but contempt for the United Nations and humanity and said the United States would not allow him to remain in possession of weapons of mass destruction for even a few months longer.

“Saddam Hussein has shown contempt for the will of this council ... and utter contempt for human life,” he said, adding: “Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him.”

In addition, he alleged, Saddam had threatened Iraqi scientists with death if they divulged information to the inspectors, had ordered officials to hide correspondence on military industrialization and ordered the removal of prohibited weapons from key sites.

“Saddam Hussein and his regime are doing everything they can to make sure the inspectors find absolutely nothing,” Powell said.

He played two audiotapes of intercepted conversations between Iraqi officials that he said proved Baghdad’s intent to deceive the inspectors.

The tapes, he said, were not “isolated incidents, but part and parcel of a policy of evasion and deception decided at the highest levels of the regime”.

Mr Powell said proof of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions dated back a decade and that in the early 1990s it had undertaken a “massive clandestine nuclear programme”, developing sophisticated techniques of gas diffusion, gas centrifuge and laser isotope separation.

“If Saddam had not been stopped, he would have produced a bomb by 1993,” he said.

He said Baghdad had, between 1999 and 2000, negotiated with companies in India, Romania, Russia and Slovenia to buy magnets and other equipment needed in the production of nuclear weapons.

The secretary of state also said Iraq had the ability to produce the deadly smallpox virus that could be weaponized, maintaining that Baghdad had investigated dozens of biological agents that cause gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever.