US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell said yesterday that the United States had heard reports that the Iraqi authorities planned to use chemical weapons against Iraqis in the south and blame it on the United States.
"There are such reports. I have no doubt that he [Saddam Hussein] would do such a thing if he thought it served his interest," Mr Powell told the Fox News Channel in an interview.
"We are concerned about it. We will follow this matter carefully. We will also get everything we can together - all the intelligence that we can," he added.
A senior State Department official who asked not to be named said the report was that Mr Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin and the commander in the south, had authority to use chemical weapons against the local Shi'a Muslim population. He declined to say where the information came from.
Mr Majid, known in the West as Chemical Ali, has been blamed for the chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, which killed about 5,000 people.
The State Department official repeated a report, first circulated at the Pentagon early this month, that the Iraqis were trying to acquire uniforms similar to those worn by US and British forces "in order to carry out massacres, which would then be blamed on coalition forces".
He gave no details of the source of the claim.