ROME, July 19: An Italian journalist on Saturday claimed that she — and not Italy’s secret services — had supplied US diplomats in Rome with forged documents indicating that Iraq sought to procure uranium from Niger.

Elisabetta Burba, a political journalist for Italian news magazine Panorama, told Il Corriere della Sera newspaper that she had obtained the documents in October 2002 through a “previously reliable source”.

After travelling to Niger to investigate the matter, however, she rejected the documents as fakes and delivered them to the US embassy in Rome.

“I went alone and handed them the file. No one ever mentioned it to me again and, in any case, we had already decided not to run the story,” Burba told the newspaper. She flatly denied that Italy’s military intelligence service, the SISMI, had played part in supplying the documents to Washington.

“I can say that my source was not an agent of the military intelligence service, even if I cannot give his name,” she said.

“I never had any contact with them, no one ever approached me. As far as I am concerned, I can guarantee that the SISMI had nothing to do with this.”

Burba is due to tell her full story in the upcoming issue of Panorama, which belongs to the media empire owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.—AFP