Saddam Hussein's regime used Jordanian banks to open letters of credit (L/Cs) to purchase weapons and other materials between 1996 and 2003, when the UN's oil-for-food programme should have prevented all but the most essential imports reaching Iraq according to a report in the Washington Times.

The report says that an Iraqi businessman described to the newspaper how easy it was for the regime to manipulate the oil-for-food programme and use L/Cs to import forbidden dual-use technology.

Jordanian window

Saddam and the then chief of Iraq's ballistic-missile weapons system, Hussein Kamil, hatched a plan to sell Iraqi goods abroad, put the cash in Jordanian banks, then open L/Cs there to pay for embargoed materials and import them through Jordan's Aqaba port the report says.

Iraq used Jordan "as the window to the world, to obtain all available weapons and materials from [former] communist and socialist countries", the businessman is quoted as saying.

Missile systems

He is also said to have provided an example in which Saddam and Kamil set up a Jordanian-Iraqi venture called Al-Qaim, headed by a close relative of the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

That company, according to the Washington Times' source, signed contracts with Iraq's ministry of industry and supplied it with missile-guidance systems stolen by the Russian mafia from the Russian army.

The real contract presented to the Iraqi Central Bank according to the report said US$10 million should be paid for the importation of electronic parts, without any further definition of what those parts might be.

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