LONDON: UN weapons inspectors on Friday flatly contradicted claims by Tony Blair that they were given information from “a number of sources” about Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons.

Officials at the International Atomic Energy Authority insisted that, contrary to the British prime minister’s statement to members of the British parliament this week, the only intelligence about attempts to buy uranium from Niger came from documents that were found to be forgeries.

Only some time after the forgeries were revealed on March 7 by the IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei did the inspectors receive further ill-defined information.

“We’ve now been told vaguely there is something else,” one official said. “But at the time, the forged documents were the only intelligence we had.” Mr Blair repeated his claim in the British House of Commons on Wednesday that Britain had independent sources for the story. “I’m not going into the details of what particular intelligence it was,” he said, “but there was intelligence judged by the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time to be correct.”

As the controversy over the accuracy of the intelligence assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction raged on this week, British government officials have been briefing journalists about “much more reliable” and “wholly different” sources.

The claim about Iraq trying to buy uranium oxide from Africa first emerged in the British government’s document about Iraqi weapons procurement on September 24 last year. The assertion was used by both the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and George Tenet, the CIA chief, to persuade Congress to support the war on Iraq.

But even before IAEA officials realised the documents were forgeries, they had serious doubts about the authenticity of the claim because of the nature of Niger’s uranium extraction industry.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.