Iraqi Vice President Mr Taha Yassin Ramadan has accused UN arms inspectors of spying for the United States and Israel to prepare the ground for a US-led attack on Iraq.
The inspectors are "spies in the pay of the CIA and the Mossad," Mr Ramadan,
"Their work is a work of espionage for the benefit of the CIA and Mossad," Mr Ramadan told a group of visiting Egyptian parliamentarians and religious dignitaries, that also included foreign journalists.
"The inspectors did not come to satisfy themselves that Iraq does not possess weapons of mass destruction, but came to provide the best conditions and the most precise intelligence for the attack to come," he added.
Earlier today, an Iraqi foreign ministry spokesman criticised the arms experts for the first time since they began inspections last week, wondering if they had started "misbehaving" as their predecessors had done.
"The question is: Is it a start of misbehavior which would recreate the climate that marked relations between previous arms inspection teams and Iraq," he asked in reference to the inspectors' first visit to a presidential site yesterday.
In a statement quoted by the official INA news agency and broadcast on state television, the spokesman also wondered if the inspectors were starting to behave in the "bad" way which "the United States, Britain and the Zionist entity are seeking to impose on the United Nations."
AFP