More on WMD....

Yet another senior Iraqi figure is saying Saddam had WMD.

Saddam Hussein's foreign minister was recruited by the CIA to spy on the regime, a US television network said.

Naji Sabri told the intelligence agency that Iraq possessed secret stocks of chemical weapons.

If confirmed, the claims made yesterday by NBC's Nightly News help to explain why President George W Bush and Tony Blair were so confident that Saddam was lying about weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Sabri reportedly said Saddam had around "500 metric tonnes of chemical warfare agents", that production of the agents had been renewed and that Iraq had additional stockpiles left over from the Iran-Iraq war.

As a senior member of Saddam's inner circle and a friend of his son, Qusay, Mr Sabri would have seemed an extraordinarily good source. He also claimed that although Saddam desperately wanted a nuclear device, he was years from building one.