June 21, 2003	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 20,1424

LONDON, June 20: British legislator George Galloway, accused of being in the pay of Saddam Hussein, demanded an official inquiry on Monday after a US newspaper admitted that documents detailing the claim were almost certainly forged.

The lawmaker from Britain’s ruling Labour Party said it was clear he had been the victim of a conspiracy over widespread allegations that he took millions of dollars from the deposed Iraqi government to promote its interests in the west.

Mr Galloway demanded that British Prime Minister Tony Blair look into the matter.

“I want to know who forged these documents,” he said in a statement.

“I am calling on the prime minister, as head of the co-occupying power in Iraq, to investigate how this conspiracy came about.”

Galloway was speaking after the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor conceded that a story it ran on April 25, which reported that Baghdad paid Galloway 10 million dollars over a decade, was based on Iraqi documents it now believed were forged.

“An extensive Monitor investigation has subsequently determined that the six papers ... are, in fact, almost certainly forgeries,” the paper wrote on Friday.

“At the time we published these documents, we felt they were newsworthy and appeared credible, although we did explicitly state in our article that we could not guarantee their authenticity,” said Monitor editor Paul Van Slambrouck.

“It is important to set the record straight: We are convinced the documents are bogus. We apologize to Mr. Galloway and to our readers,” he added.

The paper’s investigation had used chemical tests to show that documents, dated from 1992 and 1993, were most probably only a few months old, it said.

The Monitor obtained its evidence via an Iraqi general, who said he had obtained them from a home once used by Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s son.

Mr Galloway, who visited Baghdad on a number of occasions and was an outspoken opponent of UN sanctions against Iraq, has vehemently denied the allegations.

They were first aired by Britain’s Daily Telegraph on April 22, after it reported having found a memo in the Iraqi foreign ministry in Baghdad suggesting that Galloway took a slice of oil earnings worth 375,000 pounds.

The British newspaper insisted on Friday that it still had “complete confidence” in its own case.

“Our story was based on a different set of documents found in a different set of circumstances. They were not supplied or given to us but unearthed by our reporter, David Blair, in the foreign ministry in Baghdad,” Telegraph said. —AFP