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 on Monday 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 tonnes 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 the businessman, 62, was one of the key middlemen, supplying tonnes of banned chemicals to Iraq from 1984 to 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 at his home in Milan on a warrant from US Customs. They accused him of shipping 528 tonnes of thiodiglycol, a chemical used in the textile industry, from a company in Maryland to Iraq. When combined with hydrochloric acid, thiodiglycol produces mustard gas, a chemical agent used in the First World War which causes severe blistering, attacks the eyes and lungs and often kills or blinds its victims.

The UN 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.

He was released from custody in Italy and fled to Iraq where he lived as a fugitive in Baghdad. He was reported to have worked for the Ministry of Military Industrialisation and was occasionally seen in 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 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 last year, Mr van Anraat is believed to have escaped 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.

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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