World briefs 07/18/03

Britain investigates claims of fake war report

LONDON -- Sky News has suspended two journalists and opened an investigation into a charge they faked a report claiming to show a missile being launched from a submarine during the Iraq war, the satellite network said.

"We are fiercely proud of our reputation for accuracy and integrity in our reporting," head of news Nick Pollard said in a statement. "This allegation has come as a complete surprise and will be fully investigated."

The Guardian newspaper on Thursday reported that a not-yet-aired episode of the British Broadcasting Corp. documentary "Fighting the War" shows that a Sky team reported a missile-launch exercise from a docked Royal Navy submarine as if it were a launch from a vessel in action.

The BBC declined to confirm the content of its documentary or comment on The Guardian's report.

The Guardian said the BBC program, scheduled to air Sunday, showed Sky News correspondent James Forlong narrating what appeared to be preparations for a missile launch but was actually an exercise conducted for the benefit of the Sky camera crew.

Report: Syria ready for peace talks

JERUSALEM -- Syrian President Bashar Assad said he was ready to renew peace talks with Israel and to intervene in the case of four Israelis missing in Lebanon, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday.

Bashar made the offer during a meeting with U.N. Mideast envoy Terje Roed-Larsen last week in Damascus, according to the report in the Maariv daily.

A spokesman for Roed-Larsen denied the report.

"Mr. Roed-Larsen does not usually comment on what happens in diplomatic meetings," the spokesman, Mark Dennis, said. "But the quotes in Maariv today are absolutely incorrect. The quotes attributed to President Assad about the whereabouts of the Israeli MIAs... are not true."

Israel's foreign minister reacted coolly to the report, saying Syria's conditions for the talks were not acceptable.

Iraqi said to counter U.S. claims on tubes, bomb project

VIENNA, Austria -- A key Iraqi scientist recently told the CIA that high-strength aluminum tubes bought by Baghdad weren't meant for nuclear bomb production, as President Bush suggested in his State of the Union address, two experts on Iraq's nuclear program say.

Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, who headed a uranium-enrichment unit vital to Iraq's pre-1991 bomb plans, "also said that since '91 they hadn't resurrected a nuclear weapon program," according to ex-Iraq inspector David Albright, an American physicist who acted as a go-between for Obeidi to talk to U.S. authorities a few weeks ago.

The assertion that Baghdad had revived its nuclear project was central to the Bush administration's call for war early this year.

On March 16, three days before the U.S.-British invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney said Iraq was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons" and even that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Jacques Baute, chief U.N. nuclear inspector for Iraq, said he also had learned, from a trusted source, of Obeidi's statements about the tubes and program status.

Rebel leaders join Congo's new government

KINSHASA, Congo -- As fighting raged Thursday in northeast Congo, two main rebel leaders were sworn in as vice presidents in a new power-sharing government created to end the country's nearly five-year civil war.

The new government, headed by President Joseph Kabila, brings together the rebels, Kabila's supporters and the unarmed opposition in an effort to unify a nation the size of Western Europe torn apart by fighting since 1998.

"A new page of the history of the country will be written, and it will be a rosy one I hope," government spokesman Vital Kamere said. "There is no more old government and no more rebels. We are all one government."

Reports of new fighting in the northeastern reaches of the country, however, cast a shadow over hopes that peace could hold in the vast, mineral-rich central African country.

-- From wire reports