Britain: Mr Tony Blair yesterday defended his belief in allegations that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons programme, saying Britain's evidence was separate from forged information used - but now repudiated - by Washington to make the same case.
Mr Blair's spokesman said Britain had "different knowledge" from the US to back up its charge, set out in Mr Blair's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. "We included it in the dossier on our own analysis and assessment," his spokesman told reporters.
His comments followed an admission by the White House's National Security Council that President George W. Bush's claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was based on forged documents. The announcement added to controversy which has dogged Mr Bush and Mr Blair over whether they manipulated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to make the case for war against Baghdad.
Nearly three months after Saddam was toppled, no such weapons have yet been found in Iraq.
Mr Blair, choosing his words carefully, insisted yesterday that evidence of a weapons programme would eventually be uncovered and denied his government had pushed Britain's intelligence services into exaggerating the threat from Iraq.
He also defended the evidence Britain had of Saddam's attempts to buy uranium from the central African country of Niger. "Insofar as our intelligence services are concerned, they stand by that," he told a parliamentary committee.
US government sources said Italy's intelligence service had circulated reports about the Niger documents - not the documents themselves - to other Western intelligence services in early 2002, and that was apparently how the British and US intelligence services learned of them.
"I don't know where the Americans got their information from. Our information comes from good, reliable sources, not British sources, which is why we were never at liberty to pass anything to the Americans," a British official, who declined to be named, said. He declined to say exactly who had provided the information used by Britain. - (Reuters)