September 16, 2003	Tuesday	Rajab 18, 1424

LONDON, Sept 15: The British government sparked a row with the BBC in order to divert attention from charges that it had tampered with a dossier on Iraq’s alleged weapons arsenal in the run-up to war, BBC director general Greg Dyke told a parliamentary inquiry on Monday.

“I thought there was a significant attack going on to the BBC that I think had been pre-planned,” the BBC chief told the second phase of the inquiry into Dr David Kelly’s death.

Alastair Campbell, former media advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, angrily attacked the public broadcaster before a parliamentary foreign affairs committee after it first aired the report on May 29.

But Mr Dyke suggested on Monday that the government had kicked up a row with the BBC over the September dossier in order to divert attention from an earlier government report — the so-called “dodgy dossier”, published in February 2003.

“It appeared to both Richard Sambrook (BBC’s director of news) and I that the purpose, that one possible reason for the purpose of the attack, was that the foreign affairs committee would not then look in such detail at Alastair Campbell’s role in the February dossier, the dodgy dossier,” Dyke said.

“He was accusing us of lying, saying that parts of the BBC had run an agenda against the war,” Dyke said.—AFP