A Dutch Businessman accused of supplying Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons that were used to kill thousands of Kurdish civilians is due to be charged with war crimes this week more than a decade after he fled to Iraq.

Frans van Anraat, who lived in Baghdad as a fugitive for 13 years, was seized by Dutch police yesterday and is due to appear in court in Arnhem where he faces charges of complicity to commit genocide and breaking the laws of war.

"The man is suspected of delivering thousands of tons of raw materials for chemical weapons to the former regime in Baghdad between 1984 and 1988," Dutch prosecutors said in a statement.

"The chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government in the war against Iran and against the Kurdish population in northern Iraq."

Investigators believe that Mr van Anraat, 62, was one of the key middlemen who supplied tonnes of banned chemicals to Iraq between 1984 and 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war.

The Iraqis built and used chemical weapons repeatedly against Iranian troops and their own Kurdish population. In the most infamous incident, 5,000 Kurdish civilians were killed in a sustained poison gas attack on the town of Halabja in March 1988.

In 1989 Mr van Anraat was arrested by Italian police at his home in Milan on a warrant from US Customs. They accused him of shipping 528 tons of thiodiglycol, a chemical commonly used in the textile industry, from a company in Maryland to Iraq.

When combined with hydrochloric acid, thiodiglycol produces mustard gas, a chemical agent first used in First World War which causes severe blistering, attacks the eyes and lungs and often kills or blinds its victims.

The United Nations believes that Mr van Anraat was one of the main foreign suppliers to Iraq, making 36 shipments of potentially lethal chemicals to Iraq from companies in the West.

Mr van Anraat was released from custody in Italy and then fled to Iraq where he lived as a fugitive in a villa in Baghdad. He reportedly was given a job working for the Ministry of Military Industrialisation and was occasionally sighted around the city driving a white Oldsmobile and in the company of his Moroccan girlfriend.

In a Dutch television interview two years ago, he confessed that he had shipped materials to Iraq, but insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. "This was not my main business, this is something I did in passing," he told the Netwerk television programme.

"Somewhere once back then, I got the request whether I could deliver certain products to them, which they needed. And because I had a very good relationship with the (Iraqi) Oil Ministry, and that's where the request came from, I tried to see if I could do it. And that was successful and we did deliver some materials."

After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Mr van Anraat is believed to have escaped from the country via Syria and slipped back into the Netherlands, where he remained until his arrest in Amsterdam. Police said that when he was seized his bags were packed and he appeared to be preparing to leave the country.

Although the suspect does not seem to have broken any Dutch export laws, prosecutors intend to prove that he knew that the chemicals he was shipping would be turned into poison gas by the Iraqis and used against Saddam's enemies.

"From different sources it can be deduced that the suspect was aware of the destination and the final purpose for the base materials supplied by him. One of the most infamous attacks with chemical weapons is the destruction of the Kurdish town of Halabja on March 16, 1988. During this attack an estimated 5,000 people were killed," the prosecutor's office said.

His trial could coincide with the first hearings in Baghdad of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which is due to begin proceedings against leading figures in the former regime including Saddam Hussein, who faces seven charges of crimes against humanity.

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