French Iraq 'plot' inquiry urged

Claims that the French security services worked with Iraq to disrupt a conference on the widespread use of torture and murder by Saddam Hussein's regime should be investigated by France's parliament, a Labour MP said.

Ann Clwyd says that documents uncovered in Iraq's foreign ministry by a British journalist indicate a co-ordinated effort to undermine a Paris meeting of Indict, the organisation she founded to press for legal action against members of Saddam's regime.

Ms Clwyd has been a tireless campaigner

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has already pledged to investigate the alleged incident and make a written statement to MPs, she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Ms Clwyd - an advocate of attacking Iraq to remove its regime - said she had chaired the conference in 2000 which was aimed at raising the profile of Indict in France.

Death threats

"If these documents that have been found in the foreign ministry in Baghdad are accurate it shows that the French secret service and the Iraqi secret service worked together to disrupt an Indict conference that we held in Paris three years ago.

"It was certainly disrupted and there are memos in the files ... that show [former Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf] is the same man who wrote the memo saying that he had been 'successful in disrupting the enemy conference'.

"This is a memo sent to Saddam Hussein and there are other documents showing that the Iraqi secret service and the French secret service worked together to do exactly that.

"We got a telephone at our office in London ... threatening to kill everyone at the conference.

The Iraqi information minister may have had a sinister role

"At the same time the British police received a warning that everybody at the Paris conference would be dead by the end of the day."

Ms Clwyd went on to say that during the conference - attended by the wife of the former French president Francois Mitterrand - an Iraqi man had been found secretly filming people giving evidence of the torture they had suffered at the hands of the Saddam regime.

"The French police let this particular man go along with the video tape after confirming he did have diplomatic immunity."

The man had been attached to the Moroccan embassy in Paris and complaints were subsequently issued to their ambassador and the French authorities, Ms Clwyd said.