Iraq denies using chemicals

Press, 8 March 1984, Page 10

Iraq denies using chemicals

NZPA-AP Nicosia, Cyprus

Iraq denied yesterday that it had used chemical weapons against Iran, and called the United States “unbalanced and hypocritical” for saying that it believed Iran’s allegations. An Iranian soldier, aged 42, has died in Austria, the second to die in two days of those flown abroad for emergency treatment. A 17-year-old soldier died in Sweden. Two others in Austria were in intensive care.

Herbert Benzer, a doctor of Vienna’s General Hospital, said that the soldier who died had been injured by a chemical substance that, “destroys the skin and the membranes and also the bone-marrow.” v ’

Iraq announced that its forces had launched a coun-ter-attack to recapture-the

Majnun Island oil field. Iraq said that if it could not regain control of the Majnun, it might be driven to “destroy” Kharg Island, Iran’s main terminal for oil exports in the Gulf region. Iran,.which seized Majnun 11 days ago, verified that Iraq had launched a “massive” counter-attack and that it had been repulsed with heavy losses.

The claims could not be independently verified. Foreign correspondents are rarely permitted in war zones during battles.

There were two separate denials on the chemical weapons allegation: one was by the Iraqi Defence Minister, General Adnan Khairallah, who spoke to foreign journalists in Bagdad, and the other by an unidentified Foreign Ministry spokesman

who was quoted by the official Iraqi news agency. Iran alleges that chemical weapons were used by Iraq last week in marshland near Iraq’s second-biggest city of Basra. A State Department spokesman, John Hughes, said in Washington on Tuesday that “available evidence” showed Iraq was using chemical weapons. The unidentified Iraqi official quoted by the Iraqi news agency said that the American contention was “unbalanced and hypocritcal.” “These charges were aimed at directing attention away from the Iranian aggression against Iraq and in casting doubts on Iraq’s legitimate right of selfdefence,” the spokesman said. General , Khairallah

denied the use of chemical weapons. In an apparent reference to American use of defoliants in the Vietnam war, he spoke of “how the United States treated the Vietnamese people” and accused Washington of hypocrisy. The disputed island, whose name “Majnun” is Arabic for “crazy,” lies in the Hawizah marshlands, a wilderness of swamps and reed clumps straddling the Iran-Iraq border. Iran’s Parliamentary Speaker, Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, quoted unnamed Arab officials on Monday as saying that the island’s oil deposits would cover Teheran’s demand for 3U5150 billion in reparations from Iraq for damage sustained in the first two years of the war.