Unknown numbers of IRA weapons have ended up in the hands of splinter groups and no-one can say that all have been decommissioned, the Reverend Ian Paisley said today.

The veteran loyalist leader said that he had gone into a meeting with General John de Chastelain and his arms monitors this morning with serious questions about their statement that the IRA had disarmed.

The arms monitors reported yesterday that they had seen the destruction of weaponry which matched the estimates of both British and Irish governments.

But Mr Paisley said that he emerged from the meeting "shocked about what we learnt", and he accused the monitors of colluding in a cover-up.

He said the intelligence estimates used by members of the International Independent Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) to judge whether all the IRA weapons were gone had been revised.

"The more spotlight is put on this, the more we discover there is a cover-up," said Mr Paisley after he and Democratic Unionist Party colleagues spent over an hour with Gen de Chastelain.

"Even the security forces admit that some of the weapons that were in the original lists are now given to other dissident organisations, and that is very serious.

"Part of the weapons that should have been decommissioned have disappeared, and the security forces admit they are probably in the hands of dissidents."

He said even the weapons estimate used had an upper and lower tolerance - but the general had refused to disclose whether weapons actually decommissioned met the higher or lower level.

He said they "got the greatest surprise of all" when they discovered that improvised weapons were not covered on the intelligence lists.

Mr Paisley said: "These things put a question, a very big question, over what has taken place. When we came to any question which could unravel what needs to be unravelled and could put some light on these things, they refused to give us any answers."

He cast doubts on the impartiality of the Catholic and Methodist churchmen who acted as independent witnesses, saying he was told that they had been nominated neither by the Government nor the decommissioning body. "They were the IRA’s nominated witnesses," he said.

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