"Superior French Diplomacy"? Italy Begs to Differ

A row has broken out between France and Italy over whose intelligence service is to blame for the Niger uranium controversy, which led to Britain and America claiming wrongly that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for nuclear bombs.

Italian diplomats say privately that France was behind forged documents that at first appeared to prove that Iraq was seeking "yellow-cake" uranium in Niger - evidence used by Britain and America to promote the case for war with Iraq.

They say that France's intelligence services used an Italian-born middle-man to circulate a mixture of genuine and bogus documents to "trap" the two leading proponents of war with Saddam Hussein into making unsupportable claims.

They have passed to British journalists a photograph that they claim shows the Italian go-between, sometimes known as "Giacomo" - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - meeting a senior French intelligence officer based in Brussels.

"The French hoped that the bulk of the documents would be exposed as false, since many of them obviously were," an Italian official said. "Their aim was to make the allies look ridiculous in order to undermine their case for war."