Iraq rejects British claims its smuggling oil to Syria

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.N.-Iraq talks this week should not focus on demands for the return of weapons inspectors but should aim to resolve all issues, including U.S. threats against the country, Iraq's vice president said Monday.

Taha Yassin Ramadan also denied reports that Iraq has been illicitly selling oil to Syria through a pipeline in violation of U.N. sanctions.

"This is not true, not true," Ramadan told a news conference.

Last month, Britain reported Syria was receiving 150,000 to 200,000 barrels of oil daily through a pipeline from Iraq it opened in 2000.

Under U.N. sanctions imposed since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, all Iraqi oil sales have to be approved by the world body and their revenues must be spent on humanitarian goods for the Iraqi people.

The sanctions cannot be lifted until arms inspectors certify that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been eliminated along with the long-range missiles to deliver them. The inspectors left Baghdad in December 1998 ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes. Iraq has refused to let inspectors back in, insisting it has complied with the U.N. resolutions.

Ramadan said that in the talks scheduled for Wednesday through Friday at the United Nations in New York, Iraq would aim to discuss the lifting of the sanctions, the U.S. and British aircraft patrolling the skies of Iraq, and America's declared intention to overthrow President Saddam Hussein.

"The issue of inspectors is not the only or the main issue, as the U.S. administration paints it," he said.

President Bush has warned Iraq it would face unspecified consequences if it did not allow the return of the inspectors, who are charged with verifying that Iraq has eliminated its weapons of mass destruction.

Asked about reports that the United States had decided to postpone any possible offensive against Iraq until next year, Ramadan said: "The continuous talk of aggression from the U.S. administration ... is an expression of the criminal method of this administration."

Earlier Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told reporters the Bush administration lacked the "capability" to remove Saddam.

In Moscow, Russia's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, urged a political solution to Iraq's standoff with the United Nations as he met with his Iraqi counterpart and prepared to host the chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix.

"It is necessary to find a solution that will get the Iraqi problem out of deadlock" Ivanov said at the start of talks Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Sabri will meet with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Blix at the talks in New York.

Russia is Iraq's biggest trade partner and ally on the U.N. Security Council. Russia has pushed for the lifting of the U.N. sanctions, hoping Baghdad would be able to pay off its $7 billion Soviet-era debt to Moscow and resume trade.