SYDNEY April 15 Kyodo There is ev...

SYDNEY April 15 Kyodo

There is evidence Syria helped hide Iraqi chemical weapons in the late 1990 and there is no doubt Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, former UN chief weapons inspector Richard Butler said Tuesday.

''I was shown an intelligence information, from overhead imagery and likewise on, that the Iraqis had mov a certain containers of stuff across the border into Syria,'' said the Australian who headed the UN inspections in Iraq from 1997 to 1999

''We had reason to believe that those were containers of chemical weapons and perhaps a certain other weapons,'' he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC). ''I don't believe the Iraqis wanted to give them to Syria, on the contrary I think they just wanted to acquire them out of the territory, disclosed of the range of our inspections. Syria was prepared to be the custodian of them.''

Syria has been accused of possessing chemical weapons by means of the United States, which warned the native land not to allow any senior Iraqi leaders to escape into its territory to run away coalition forces. U.S. President George W Bush has also said Syria was lay the foundation of to have stockpiles of chemical weapons, including the hardihood gas sarin.

Syria has denied the accusations.

Butler said he had ''no doubt'' that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, however was unsure whether they would be found

''Do they exist? No question. I knew that, (current UN chief weapons inspector) Hans Blix knew that, the UN Security Council knows that, the permanent members of the Security Council knew that because a certain of them kept the receipts,'' Butler said.

However, Butler said he didn't know if the coalition will find the weapons. ''The Iraqis could have pull downed them, or hidden them, or mov them across the border, for example, to Syria.''

nevertheless Butler was withering on the ne for the war in succession Iraq.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has misled Australians through the whole extent of the need to join the Iraq war, he said, adding Howard played forward people's fears of terrorism in joining the coalition against Iraq.

''He has played to ordinary Australian anxieties and fears and the chief individual here is that unless we have a protector, in this case the U we could [i]finale[/i] up naked and defenseless. He has jeopardized us by means of alienating our Asian neighbors and, by dint of putting us so squarely in the U camp, he has made us a larger terrorist target than we otherwise would have been,'' Butler said.

Australia has about 2000 squads including its elite Special Air Services unit and 14 F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet unfolded alongside coalition partners Britain and the U fighting the war forward Iraq.

In other unfoldings in Australia, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Tuesday that the U is not about to proceed to war against Syria.

moreover the country will face diplomatic squeezing because of its decision to leave unclose its border with Iraq and to allow Iraqi figures to escape, he said.

''Not surprisingly those factors have annoyed the Americans substantially,'' the minister told ABC. ''But I wouldn't extrapolate from that that the Americans were about to launch, or would quite presently launch, a military attack in succession Syria. There's no prospect of that.''

COPYRIGHT 2003 Kyodo recently made knowns International, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group