They and eyewitnesses also say Khalid Ibrahim
Sa'id was killed not when he tried to "run a roadblock," as asserted by
Kay, but when a U.S. tank crew blasted his civilian car without warning on
an open street.
These accounts of the physicist's research and death, provided by 10
Iraqis and supported on key points by U.N. arms inspectors, challenge a
core element of Kay's testimony Oct. 2 to congressional committees in
Washington.
The Associated Press asked Kay's Iraq (news
- web
sites) Survey Group to better detail its allegations about the late
scientist, but the ISG repeatedly declined. The U.S. weapons hunters also
have not disclosed any basis for such allegations to U.N. inspectors,
although they had been expected to do so under U.N. resolutions.
President Bush (news
- web
sites) endorsed Kay's work again Oct. 28, telling reporters his chief
weapons investigator "continues to ferret out the truth." But Sa'id's
longtime colleagues and friends sharply disagree, calling what they read
in Kay's report "lies."
"Sa'id is a good catch for David Kay because he is silent. He can't
defend himself," said nuclear scientist Sabah Abdul Noor, a friend for 30
years.
Those challenging the American's allegations include physicists known
not to have supported Saddam Hussein (news
- web
sites)'s ousted Baath Party regime or its work in the 1980s on
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Kay's mixed CIA (news
- web
sites)-military Iraq Survey Group, staffed with weapons specialists,
was deployed here to try to substantiate claims made by the Bush
administration to justify the March invasion — assertions that Baghdad
still possessed prohibited chemical and biological arms and had resumed
its nuclear weapons program.
In his Oct. 2 interim report, Kay acknowledged that his teams had found
no such weapons or nuclear program.
Instead, he shifted the focus to Iraqi "aspirations," "intentions" and
"capabilities." In his 700-word nuclear section, that focus fell largely
on Khalid Sa'id.
Kay told congressmen that beginning around 2000, Sa'id "began several
small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives that could be
applied to nuclear weapons development." His report did not describe that
research, however, and said, "These initiatives did not in and of
themselves constitute a resumption of the nuclear weapons program."
It then added that "regretfully" the scientist was killed on April 8,
as U.S. troops entered Baghdad, "when the car he was riding in attempted
to run a Coalition roadblock."
"To begin with, this is a lie," Noor said.
He and other scientist friends said they learned how Sa'id died from
his family and others, an account corroborated by three eyewitnesses in AP
interviews.
That morning, the friends recounted, the Nissan Patrol utility vehicle
carrying Sa'id, his driver and another man turned onto the main avenue of
south Baghdad's Khadra district, for the physicist to check on his empty,
shuttered home. They apparently were unaware that advancing U.S. tanks had
reached Khadra, and a tank stood at the far end of the avenue.
"Anything that moved, they would shoot," said Mohammed Hassan, 36, an
avenue resident who said he saw Sa'id's vehicle approaching. "People were
running madly here and there with their children. People on foot were shot
here," another witness, Jamal Abbas, 40, told the AP as he stood on the
Khadra curbside.
People tried to signal Sa'id's car and another one to stop, but it was
too late, the witnesses said. From a few hundred yards away, they said,
the tank crew fired its cannon at both vehicles.
At least one shell struck the Nissan and turned it into an inferno,
killing the driver and third man, and fatally wounding Sa'id, they said.
He died four hours later in a hospital, friends said. The driver's body
was left burning in the melting vehicle.
The witnesses said there was no "Coalition roadblock" for the Nissan to
run, as asserted by Kay. "There was no justification at all for this.
There wasn't any resistance here in Khadra," Hassan said.
Asked specifically, ISG spokesman Kenneth Gerhart in Washington
declined to identify the basis for the roadblock story.
As for Sa'id's recent research, physicists who observed it or worked
with him said he had been trying, since 2000, to develop an
electromagnetic or particle gun — unrelated to nuclear weapons. Such an
advanced gun would, for example, fire its load at incoming aircraft.
Noor, a materials specialist, said he sometimes visited the gun project
and consulted with Sa'id.
Sa'id, in his early 60s, was educated in the United States and at
Britain's University of Reading, where he obtained a Ph.D. in solid-state
physics. He was described by friends as a man of great energy, obsessed
with his work and "Baathist to the bone."
He did have a background in nuclear weapons research; like Noor and
many other Iraqi physicists, he was involved in Iraq's effort in the 1980s
to develop a bomb, a program that failed and was dismantled after the 1991
Gulf War (news
- web
sites) by inspectors of the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic
Energy Agency.
Those U.N. inspectors kept watch on such scientists in the 1990s. Sa'id
was not found to be working on prohibited projects during that period, a
senior IAEA official told the AP from agency headquarters in Vienna,
Austria. He asked that his name not be used because of the diplomatic
sensitivity of the issues.
In fact, in the lead-up to war earlier this year, the IAEA reported it
never found evidence Iraq had resumed nuclear weapons work at all after
early 1991.
Another longtime colleague, physicist Hamed M. al-Bahili, said he saw a
film record of Sa'id's final project, showing model gun "engines" on
stands in a small lab. Al-Bahili called it a failure. "They spent 2 1/2
years on it, so much money on it." Noor said the work "was in a primitive
stage."
Molecular physicist Abdel Mehdi Talib, Baghdad University's dean of
sciences, was a longtime friend of Sa'id's and next-door neighbor in
Khadra, where many scientists live. He laughed as he read Kay's
allegations, with its almost exclusive emphasis on Sa'id, saying his
friend had fallen decades out of date on nuclear physics.
"What was Khalid, a one-man band? Playing the drums, the harmonica?"
said Talib, recently elected dean by his colleagues in part because of his
anti-Baathist background.
The university's physics department head, another longtime associate
and anti-Baathist, also scoffed at Kay's contention.
"This paragraph is completely wrong," Baha Toama Chiad said.
Kay's ISG declined to explain why it chose to link this single
scientist's recent work to possible nuclear weapons development.
Kay focused on Sa'id at another point in his congressional testimony as
well, saying it was suspected the dead physicist had been "considering a
restart of the centrifuge program" — Iraq's failed 1980s project to
produce enriched uranium as bomb material.
His colleagues were visibly startled as they read this allegation of
Kay's because, they said, Sa'id had never worked on enrichment. "I know
men who did work on centrifuges, and they never mentioned such a thing,"
Noor said.
In Vienna, the IAEA official agreed. He said Sa'id had not worked on
the old centrifuge program, or any enrichment activities. His belated
involvement in centrifuge development, without support of pre-1991
specialists, "would be very illogical, like reinventing the wheel," the
official said.
The ISG's Gerhart declined to specify any basis for the purported
centrifuge link. "The ISG is not commenting on its findings or operations
to the media at this time," he said.
Another leading physicist, Nabil Fahwaz of Baghdad's University of
Technology, said repeated, unsubstantiated U.S. allegations of a revived
Iraqi nuclear weapons program have been "so very wrong. ... After 1990
there was no activity."
