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OCTOBER 8, 2002 : (IRAQI DEFECTORS ACCUSE SOUTH AFRICA OF BEING INVOLVED IN IRAQ'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM) RENEWED suspicion has been cast over SA's possible involvement in the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme, with allegations by a former Baghdad intelligence officer surfacing in a US magazine. The Democratic Alliance has written to three government ministers to ask about the claim that SA had been supplying Iraq with special aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium to a weapons grade in centrifuges. The allegations came in a recent article published in Insight magazine an insert in the Washington Times and were repeated by Mark Steyn, a columnist writing in last week's Spectator a weekly magazine based in London. Sales of such tubes to Iraq would violate United Nations security council resolution 687 of 1991, which prohibits the transfer of technology that has a civilian as well as military use. Following a recent statement in a British government report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that Baghdad had attempted to acquire "significant quantities of uranium in Africa", the SA government denied that it had tried to do so in SA. Comment on the latest allegations was not available from government last night. The article in Insight by journalist Kenneth Timmerman quotes a former Iraqi intelligence officer as saying that Baghdad had bought specialised magnets from Germany and aluminum tubes from SA. According to Insight, the Iraqi intelligence officer is associated with a broad-based group opposed to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). Insight quoted the INC as saying that Iraq "is turning increasingly to SA to procure nuclear materials and forbidden equipment needed for its weapons programmes". The article said a top Iraqi intelligence official, Nadhim Jabouri, had been sent to the Iraqi embassy in SA, which Insight said mistakenly was in Johannesburg. According to the Iraqi embassy in Pretoria, no one by that names works there. Insight said that to arrange travel documents, Iraqi agents in Amman, Jordan, went through a senior diplomat based at the SA embassy. Most nuclear weapons programmes, including the one dismantled by SA in the early 1990s, would use aluminum tubes in the process of uranium enrichment. Manufactured to high tolerances, the tubes are used because of the highly reactive and toxic nature of uranium hexafluoride gas, which is separated into lighter and heavier isotopes by a centrifuge. - "IRAQ ALLEGEDLY SOUGHT SA NUCLEAR MATERIAL," Business Day (South Africa), 8th October , http://www.bday.co.za/bday/content/direct/1,3523,1194892-6094-0,00.html