US to reveal 'evidence' of Iran arming Iraqi militants

The government and military chiefs have said repeatedly that Iran had been tied to terrorist bombings in Iraq, but up to now have said little about evidence to bolster those claims.

National security officials in Washington and Iraq have been working for weeks on a presentation intended to provide evidence for Bush administration claims of what they say are Iran’s meddlesome and deadly activities.

The materials – which in their classified form include slides and some two inches of documents – provide evidence of Iran’s role in supplying Iraqi militants with highly sophisticated and lethal improvised explosive devices and other weaponry. They also lay out Iranian efforts to train Iraqis in military techniques.

But government officials say there is some disagreement about how much to make public to support the administration’s case and intelligence chiefs are worried that the sources of their information could dry up.

Among the evidence the administration will present are weapons seized over time in US-led raids on caches around Iraq, one military official in Washington said.

Other evidence included documents captured when US-led forces raided an Iranian office on January 11 in Irbil in northern Iraq, the official said.

Tehran said it was a government liaison office, but the US military said five Iranians detained in the raid were connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funded and armed insurgents in Iraq.

The claims have been met with scepticism by some US politicians still fuming over intelligence reports used by the administration to propel America to war with Iraq in 2003.

Gates’ comments came as a new Pentagon inspector general’s report criticised pre-war Defence Department assertions of al Qaida connections to Iraq.

Gates said markings on explosives provided “pretty good” evidence that Iranians were supplying either weapons or technology for Iraqi extremists.

“I think there’s some serial numbers, there may be some markings on some of the projectile fragments that we found” that point to Iran, he said.

Gates’ remarks left unclear how the US knows the serial numbers are traceable to Iran and whether such weapons would have been sent to Iraq by the Iranian government or by private arms dealers.

Explosives have been a leading killer of US forces in Iraq, where more than 3,000 servicemen and women have died in the nearly four-year-old war.

Last week, Gates said US military officers in Baghdad had been planning to brief reporters on what was known about Iranian involvement in Iraq but that he and other senior officials had delayed the briefing to assure the information was accurate.

Gates, who attended his first Nato defence ministers meeting in Seville, Spain, this week, said Iranian weapons were not a large percentage of the roadside bombs used in Iraq, but he said: “They’re extremely lethal.”

:: The United Nations atomic watchdog agency has suspended nearly half of the technical aid it provides Iran to punish it for its nuclear defiance, putting Tehran on the same footing in terms of such action as North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The move by the International Atomic Energy Agency still has to be approved by the agency’s 35-nation board at a meeting next month. But with the agency empowered by the UN Security Council to freeze any aid to Iran that could be misused for nuclear weapons, the board is likely to back the recommendations drawn up by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

ElBaradei issued the confidential report, obtained by The Associated Press, to board member nations yesterday.

the Vienna-based IAEA had already suspended aid to Iran on five occasions last month in line with security council sanctions calling for an end to assistance for programmes that could be misused to make an atomic weapon.

Yesterday the agency fully or partially suspended another 18 projects that it deemed could be misused.