Ian Gibson, MP for Norwich North, was flown to what he believes was the Middle East to meet Rihab Taha, a senior biological weapons expert who became known as Dr Germ. The disclosure sheds new light on contacts between the British Government and Saddam Hussein’s key scientists before the war and raises the possibility that Dr Taha could have been recruited by British agents.

Dr Taha, one of the most prominent women of Saddam’s reign featured in the US authorities’ pack of cards of the regime’s 52 most wanted members. She was captured in November 2003 but was freed without charge last December.

Dr Gibson taught Dr Taha in the early Eighties when he was a senior biological scientist at the University of East Anglia, where she was working on a doctorate in plant pathogens. By 2003 she was reported to be a key scientist in Saddam’s regime and was said by UN officials to have made weapons from anthrax and aflatoxin. She was married to Amir Rashid Muhammad al-Ubaydi, a former general who allegedly headed Iraq’s missile development programme.

Dr Gibson was recruited to help the security services in early 2003 after newspaper reports that he had known Dr Taha at university. A British agent told Dr Gibson that the Government had made contact with Dr Taha and wanted him to find out if she was involved in developing weapons of mass destruction, he said.

“I was interested and flattered, too,” he said. “I wanted to know if I could find anything out. I was also interested in how she felt. It was never made absolutely clear who I was talking to. It was a government department — one of the ‘M’s (MI5 or MI6).”

Days later, Dr Gibson was met by government officials and put on a chartered flight from Heathrow. He was not told his eventual destination. “It was not a conventional flight. We might have been going to Baghdad or Brussels, as far as I knew,” he said.

He was met by more British officials, some of whom wore uniform, who drove him away in a car. Dr Gibson believes that he was in the Middle East because he could see minarets. The car pulled up at an abandoned building a few miles from the airport. “I walked in and there was Rihab, wearing a dress, in an empty room save for a couple of chairs and a table,” he said. “We smiled at each other, exchanged pleasantries. I asked her how she was and what she had been doing. I eventually asked her the question that I had been asked to put to her: ‘Are you working on biological warfare?’ She said, ‘No, we have stopped all that and stopped it for some time.’ ”

Officials drove him back to the airport, again asking him few questions about his meeting. “I just said to [the agents] that I had got nothing from that, but I imagine that they would think that she would say that anyway,” he said.

Dr Gibson said that he is still trying to figure out what the British agents thought they would gain from the meeting. “Maybe they wanted an admission that there were weapons of mass destruction. Maybe they wanted to see her reaction to the question.”

Dr Gibson, 67, who opposed the subsequent war in Iraq, said: “Thinking back, we were not going to get any answer that could be relied on anyway, but I didn’t feel as if I was being lied to.”

Times Recommends

• ‘Thousands of Tamils dying’ in Sri Lanka camp
• Jackson 'rebuilt his nose before he died'
• Tehran: militiamen attack protesters