COLIN POWELL, the US Secretary of State, will unveil fresh evidence next week linking Baghdad to al-Qaeda, and satellite pictures of panicked Iraqis hiding suspected weapons of mass destruction.

The Times has learnt details of the top-secret intelligence at General Powell’s disposal as he prepares to boost the case for war against President Saddam Hussein with a much-anticipated public briefing at the United Nations on Wednesday. The presentation is seen as vital to Washington’s efforts to persuade the international community, and the American public, that the use of force against Baghdad is justified.

One well-placed US official said that the most compelling evidence was in photographs taken from spy satellites over the past few weeks, while UN inspectors hunted for Iraq’s banned weapons on the ground.

“The real killer stuff is going to be the satellite images indicating pretty clearly that Iraq was actively moving things around while Unmovic (United Nations Monitoring, Verificiation and Inspections Commission) was visiting different sites,” the official said.

“It’s pretty clear. While the inspectors are getting into cars, the Iraqis are in full panic moving boxes, crates, bulldozers and a couple of huge vans which look like mobile labs,” he said, referring to biological weapons laboratories. “That will be in the briefing.”

US officials said that they believed the UN mission in Iraq had been compromised, and that the Iraqis knew where inspection teams were heading before they set off. Washington suspects the Iraqis have spies working at the UN or are successfully monitoring UN communications.

Richard Armitage, the US Deputy Secretary of State, told Congress that General Powell would also expose details of Iraq’s hidden biological weapons programme. He said that Iraqi germ-warfare labs were “parked” in one of a multitude of “underground facilities or someone’s garage”.

“If Saddam Hussein has destroyed them, then he ought to show any smidgen of proof, but he has refused to do so,” Mr Armitage said. General Powell’s presentation will also focus on contacts between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, and its ties to an Islamic extremist group fighting the Kurds in northern Iraq.

Some of the evidence was gathered from a senior al- Qaeda official detained by the Americans and another suspect arrested in Syria.

“We learned that al-Qaeda contacted senior officials in Baghdad and sought co-operation on biological and chemicals weapons,” he said. “That checked out with other sources.” The contact was believed to have been made some time after September 11. It involved a request for training and development of biological and chemical weapons.

US officials are feverishly deciding what intelligence to declassify from photos, communications intercepts and interrogations in the effort to counter scepticism about the case against the Iraqi leader. But releasing the evidence is a delicate process, which could compromise the intelligence and jeopardise sources. If it is not convincing, it could even undermine the US case.

There is no attempt to link Saddam to the September 11 attacks by al-Qaeda members. But Mr Armitage did accuse Iraq of being implicated in last year’s assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan, whose murder was orchestrated by “an al-Qaeda member who is resident in Baghdad”.

He also touched on another theme that General Powell is expected to raise: evidence of contacts between Baghdad and a group based in northern Iraq that the US describes as an al-Qaeda affiliate. The group, Ansar al-Islam, has been fighting Saddam’s Kurdish opponents in the area of northern Iraq they control. Its members came out of Afghanistan during the US war, crossed Iran without interference and ended up in northern Iraq, the official said.

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