The most important Iraqi nuclear weapons scientist has surrendered outside Iraq, US officials said on Sunday. The surrender of Jafar Jafar, who founded and led Iraq’s clandestine efforts to build a nuclear bomb, and lt gen Amir Saadi, Saddam’s top scientific and technical adviser, means that US interrogators now have access to the two most senior figures in Iraq’s alleged programmes to create weapons of mass destruction.‘‘These are very, very significant,’’ said a US official. ‘‘They will have extremely valuable insights into where the bad stuff is, how they got it and where the other people are. The potential is there that these two guys can crack weapons programmes for us.’’ Otherwise, Pentagon weapons ‘‘exploitation’’ teams will be forced to search as many as 3,000 sites identified in a country the size of California, in hopes of finding Iraq’s suspected weapons caches and the people that produced them.Officials said the Bush administration might offer amnesty or other deals to Jafar and Saadi with the hope that they not only will cooperate, but will help arrange the surrender of other weapons scientists, engineers and technicians.Jafar was ‘‘always seen as the most important nuclear scientist’’ in Iraq and ‘‘probably the best scientist Iraq has ever produced,’’ said David Albright, a nuclear inspector in Iraq . Jafar told UN inspectors that he was jailed and tortured by Saddam’s government in the early ’90s. Upon his release, he said, he agreed to launch what soon became a multi-billion-dollar secret programme, known by the code word PC-3, to develop nuclear weapons.Jafar dropped from sight after the 1991 war but he re-emerged in 1996 and became a key source for IAEA inspector seeking to disarm Iraq under UN resolutions. They destroyed or dismantled Iraq’s entire nuclear weapons programme by 1998, according to UN reports. (LAT-WP)
