Former chief UN weapons inspector believes he was bugged: report

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, February 29, 2004

Former chief UN weapons inspector believes he was bugged: report

Former United Nations chief weaponsinspector Hans Blix has said that he suspects the United States bugged both his UN office and his home in New York before the US-led war against Iraq.

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Former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has said that he suspects the United States bugged both his UN office and his home in New York before the US-led war against Iraq.

Such behavior was "disgusting" and "it feels like an intrusion into your integrity in a situation when you are actually on the same side," the British Guardian newspaper, in its Saturday edition, quoted Blix as saying in an interview.

Blix said US State Department envoy, John Wolf, visited him two weeks before the Iraq war and showed him a set of photographs, which the former inspector believed could only be obtained within the UN weapons office through underhand means.

He said his suspicions were raised when he had trouble with a telephone connection at home. UN counter-surveillance teams were asked to check his office and home for listening devices, Blix said.

Admitting that he had no hard evidence so far that the US had bugged him, Blix said legal and moral questions had been raised. The Vienna convention prohibiting such behavior "should be applicable to the UN headquarters," he said.

Blix has long been skeptical about whether Iraq had alleged weapons of mass destruction. He urged British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush to be more open to the evidence emerging from Iraq.

"I think we should have had more critical thinking on the part of the political leadership. They should have heard the evidence. They should have heard the dissenting opinions," Blix said.

Blix's accusations came after former British cabinet minister Clare Short, who resigned last May in protest against Blair's Iraq policy, claimed Thursday that US-British intelligence bugged the office of the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Source: Xinhua

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