A seminar in Cairo on Iraqi affairs concluded that more than 310 Iraqi scientists perished at the hands of Israeli secret agents in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad to US troops in April 2003, according to a report in the Information Clearing House. The seminar was attended by politicians, journalists and experts on current Iraqi affairs. The experts said they had detected an organised campaign aimed at "liquidating Iraqi scientists" in the past 18 months and most of them pointed the finger at the Israeli secret service, Mossad, the report said.
The organisers said their aim was to highlight the plight of Iraqi scientists, particularly those who were engaged in the weapons programmes under the former regime, according to the report. "There is a joint American and Israeli plan to kill as many Iraqi scientists as possible," the report quoted Abdel Raoof al-Raidi, an ambassador and assistant foreign minister. The report said the Iraqi ambassador in Cairo, Ahmad Al-Iraqi, accused Israel of sending a "commando unit" to Iraq immediately after the US invasion, which "killed Iraqi scientists".
| Wouldn't it have been logical to send the commandos before the invasion, when the scientists presented a danger? |
"Israel has played a prominent role in liquidating Iraqi scientists ... The campaign is part of a Zionist plan to kill Arab and Muslim scientists working in applied research which Israel sees as threatening its interests," Al-Iraqi reportedly said.
| Why, sure. That makes sense. Not a lot of sense, but sense. |
Dr Imad Jad, an Israeli affairs expert at the Al-Ahram Studies Centre, said the US had already airlifted 70 Iraqi scientists out of the country and placed them in areas to make it difficult for them to "transfer information to anti-US quarters", the report said. According to the report, Dr Jad said the Ahram Centre estimated that nearly 17,000 Iraqi scientists working in various fields of knowledge have fled the country since the US-led invasion. In Baghdad, interim government officials refused to comment on the deliberations that took place in the Cairo conference, the report said, but the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Science and Technology said their own figures tally with those mentioned at the seminar, particularly regarding the number of Iraqi scientists killed so far.
| Though not necessarily who dunnit... |
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