LONDON, July 18 (Xinhuanet) --
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's office has admitted that repeated claims
that 400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves were untrue, The
Observer newspaper reported on Sunday.
According to the paper, only 5,000 corpses have been uncovered so
far.
The claims by Blair last November and December were
given widespread credence, quoted by British lawmakers and widely published,
including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass
graves.
"We've already discovered, just so far, the remains
of 400,000 people in mass graves," Blair was quoted as saying on November 20 in
the publication "Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves" produced by USAID, the US
government aid distribution agency.
On December 14 last
year, Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in
response to the arrest of former Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein.
"The remains of 400,000 human beings (have) already
(been) found in mass graves," Blair was quoted as saying.
The report came after an independent inquiry into Britain's prewar Iraq
intelligence ruled that Downing Street pushed intelligence reports "to the outer
limits" over the threat posed by Saddam's regime.
Lord
Butler, who led the probe into intelligence behind Blair's decision to join the
US-led war against Iraq, said in his report published on Wednesday that some
sources of the British
intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) were "seriously flawed."
Saddam probably had no WMD
ready for use and the government's claim of Saddam being capable of deploying
WMD within 45 minutes should not have been asserted without qualification,
Butler said.
However, Butler claimed that no evidence of
"deliberate distortion or culpable negligence" has been found during his
probe.
Butler's report followed Blair's admission that Iraq's WMD, a major justification used by the United States and Britain for the Iraq war, may never be found in the country. Enditem |
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