Sources in the US Pentagon yesterday confirmed weekend media reports that the timing of last Friday's attack on Iraq had in part been determined by a desire to avoid casualties among Chinese workers installing fibreoptic cables.
The Chinese are understood to be helping the Iraqis upgrade their radar defence communications.
The targets of the US and British aircraft were command-and-control nodes of the radar system whose improving performance, the US says, was increasingly threatening their patrols in the no-fly zone.
A key element in the change has been the use of fibre-optic cables to link air defence command centres, according to the Pentagon official.
In Beijing, the Chinese foreign ministry rejected the claim that Chinese workers assisted in the fibre-optic work. "I have never heard information like this," a foreign ministry spokesman, Mr Zhu Bangzao, said at the ministry's regular briefing.
A UN resolution should prevent the Chinese from supplying Iraq with the means to rearm. But the latter may attempt to claim that optic fibre has dual uses. In the past Chinese companies have had UN-approved contracts to repair Iraq's electrical grid, which was heavily damaged by allied bombardments during the 1991 Gulf War.
Despite the strike, US aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone over southern Iraq came under renewed surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery fire over the weekend, said Lieut Col Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.
In London, speculation was building last night about the possible implications of next week's expected review of sanctions against Iraq by senior British and US officials in Washington.
However, the tone and focus of that review will almost certainly be set by President Bush and the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, at their weekend summit at Camp David. Sceptics suggest this may result in agreement only on the need for a more concerted propaganda offensive against President Saddam Hussein's regime.
The Foreign Office Minister, Mr Brian Wilson, warned yesterday that any search for alternative "smart sanctions" would have to meet the declared goal of stopping President Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Wilson dismissed as "just fantasy" suggestions that he and other ministers had been kept in the dark about last Friday's bombing raids on Baghdad, launched just 24 hours after he had apparently signalled a willingness to consider an alternative approach.
Mr Wilson said he had known of the likely military action almost immediately after his appointment three weeks ago. He told BBC Radio: "There is no contradiction. It's not something new that there is a long and thoughtful look going on at the sanctions against Iraq.
"There are two strands to British policy. The first is to minimise the human impact, and the second is to maximise the inability of President Saddam to wage war on his own people, the region and the rest of the world."
The minister said he had "a positive desire to see sanctions developed in such a way that they do the only purpose they are intended for." But he stressed he was referring only to seeking a "better" way to achieve the same result, and rejected suggestions by Labour critics that the UK had "shot diplomacy in the foot".
The Liberal Democrats spokesman, Mr Menzies Campbell, said the present sanctions policy had failed for 10 years and should have been reviewed long before now.