THE uranium-from-Africa affair took a new twist yesterday when an Italian newspaper claimed that MI6 had been duped by forged documents given to it by Italy’s military intelligence service.

The documents, which outlined a secret deal by Iraq to buy uranium from the West African state, were obtained by the Italians from a diplomat in Niger’s Embassy in Rome, according to La Repubblica.

Despite the paper’s report, which reproduced the forged documents, British officials last night insisted that they had never received them. They were adamant that the Government’s claim that Saddam Hussain sought to buy uranium from Niger was based on sound information.

That claim was included in the dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction which the Government published last September. It was picked up and repeated by President Bush in his January State of the Union speech, although the White House and the CIA have since disowned it.La Repubblica published photocopies of four documents which suggest Iraq reached an agreement to buy 500 tonnes of uranium “yellowcake” from Niger. They appear to contain obvious errors: one document, dated October 10, 2000, has the signature of Allele Habibou, the Niger Foreign Affairs and Co-operation Minister who left office in 1989.

The newspaper quotes a source from Sismi, the Italian military intelligence agency, as saying that the documents were passed to MI6 in 2002. Six documents referring to Niger, possibly the same as those given to the Italians, were also passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by Washington. Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, told the UN Security Council in March that they were crude forgeries.

British officials stated categorically that MI6 had not been given documents from any source which had subsequently proved to be forgeries.It insisted that the reference to Niger in the dossier was based on separate intelligence.

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