The British-trained microbiologist Rihab Taha, known as ”Dr Germ” for her role in Iraq’s biological weapons programme, has surrendered to coalition forces, a US military representative announced yesterday.
Dr Taha, who refined weapons-grade anthrax, had been negotiating her surrender for several days and turned herself in at some time on Sunday or Monday, Major Brad Lowell said.
The former chief of staff of the Iraqi armed forces, Ibrahim Ahmed Mohammed, was also reported to be in US custody, but no details about his apprehension were available yesterday.
Dr Taha’s dour disposition and her record of developing and testing warheads with anthrax, botulinum toxin and other biological weapons won her the media sobriquet ”Dr Germ”, but weapons experts differ on how central she was to Saddam Hussein’s alleged efforts to build biological weapons in the 1990s.
”She seems to have been on the periphery rather than someone at the centre of things,” said Stephen Prior, a bio-defence expert at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
Nearly two dozen of the leading fugitives from the ousted Iraqi regime are now in custody.
General Mohammed was number 11 in the list of most wanted Iraqi officials and the jack of spades in the deck of cards distributed to coalition troops. Dr Taha was not in the top 55 officials included in the deck, but according to the Pentagon, she was in the top 200.
Another woman, Salih Mahdi Ammash, believed to have been charge of the more recent biological weapons experiments, surrendered last week. She was the five of hearts in the deck.
However, Hans Blix, the head of the UN weapons inspections commission, said that the microbiologist and her husband — Amer Rashid, a former oil minister and missiles expert already under arrest — would be among ”the most interesting persons” for investigators to question.
Before the war she told the BBC that Iraq had experimented with biological agents but never ”weaponised” them.
”We never had the intention to use it,” she said. ”We never wanted to cause harm and damage to anybody.”
However, UN inspectors found her notes from 1990 in which she recorded tests on artillery shells and missiles tipped with biological warheads.
According to UN weapons inspectors, Dr Taha flatly denied that Iraq had a biological programme at all, and when she was confronted with documentary evidence in 1995, she began weeping and confessed.
Dr Taha studied at the University of East Anglia from 1980 to 1984, when she completed a doctorate on plant toxins. She returned to Iraq to take charge of al-Hakem, believed to be one of the country’s main biological weapons centres.
Over a month after the fall of Baghdad, US-led forces have yet to find any concrete evidence that Iraq had an arsenal of banned weapons. American and British investigators are examining what they believe is a mobile biological weapons laboratory, but they have so far found no traces of micro-organisms which would prove it had been put to use.
Coalition forces have also yet to find traces of Saddam himself, though officials in Washington insist the former dictator has now become an irrelevance.
”I do not think it matters a great deal what Saddam and his sons are doing,” said the US national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice. She said Saddam was an ”old-fashioned dictator” who would not be able to influence the future of Iraq.
”It’s a mistake to equate Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden,” Rice said.
British soldiers have found the press passes and looted car of two ITN correspondents who disappeared five weeks ago during a friendly fire incident in Iraq.
The news organisation believes the journalists could have been captured by Iraqis, as the passes were discovered in files at a Ba’ath party office.
Fred Nerac, a French cameraman, and Hussein Osman, a Lebanese translator, went missing on March 22. The ITN reporter Terry Lloyd was killed in the same incident. – Guardian Unlimited Â