Thursday, February 16 2006 13:27 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had in the mid-1990s warned the US and Britain of a looming terror attack on their soil possibly involving weapons of mass destruction, according to secret tapes obtained by ABC News.

The tapes, mostly dating from early to mid 1990s and covering topics as relations with the US, efforts to rebuild industries from Gulf war damage and the pre 9/11 situation in Afghanistan, have been authenticated by American officials.

"Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before August 2 and told the British as well and that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction," Saddam is heard saying on the 12 hours of tapes the network obtained of his talks with his aides.

The mention of 'August 2' on the tape, which ABC said was recorded in the mid 1990s, appears to be a reference to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

Saddam, who is now on trial in Baghdad for war crimes, speculates that an attack with weapons of mass destruction could be difficult to stop.

"In the future, what would prevent a booby trapped cat causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?" Saddam is heard as saying on the recordings he made in his presidential office during the 1990s.

He, however, ruled out any such strike by Iraq, saying "this story is coming, but not from Iraq."

Former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz

At the same meeting, former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz is heard as saying that Iraq is being unfairly accused of involvement in terrorism. "Sir the biological (weapon) is very easy to make it's so simple that any biologist can make a bottle of germs and drop it into a water tower and kill 100,000," Aziz said, according to extracts released by ABC news.

"This is not done by a state. No need to accuse a state. An individual can do it," Aziz said.

The recordings also feature Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who was killed after he had defected to Jordan, explaining how Iraq hid biological weapons programmes from UN inspectors.

At a 'pivotal' meeting in late April or May 1995, Saddam and senior advisers discuss the discovery by UN teams of a biological weapons programme.

"We did not reveal all that we have," Kamel is heard as saying. "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use."

The network said the tapes were recorded in his presidential office by Saddam Hussein himself, and were obtained by it through Bill Tierney, a former member of a UN inspection team who was translating them for the FBI.

ABC News also quoted Tierney as saying that the US Government was wrong to keep the tapes a secret.

Charles Duelfer, who led the official US search for WMDs told ABC News that the tapes show extensive deception but don't prove that weapons were still hidden in Iraq at the time of the US-led war in 2003.