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British Lawmaker Interviewed “Dr. Germ” Before War
Prior to the invasion of Iraq, the United Kingdom asked a lawmaker from the Labor Party to interview Iraqi biological weapons scientist Rihab Taha, also known as “Dr. Germ,” the London Times reported today. Taha, who is believed to have made weapons including anthrax and aflatoxin under the Hussein regime, was captured in late 2003 but freed last December without being charged (see GSN, Dec. 22, 2005). Ian Gibson, while a senior biological scientist at the University of East Anglia, taught her in the early 1980s. The British government asked Gibson to meet with Taha in early 2003, and specifically to ask her if she was working on WMD programs, following newspaper reports that he had known her. “I was interested and flattered, too,” Gibson said. “I wanted to know if I could find anything out. I was also interested in how she felt. It was never made absolutely clear who I was talking to. It was a government department — one of the ‘M’s (MI5 or MI6).” Gibson was not told of his destination when he left to meet Taha. “It was not a conventional flight. We might have been going to Baghdad or Brussels, as far as I knew,” he said. British officials met him after the flight and taken to an abandoned building close to the airport. “I walked in and there was Rihab, wearing a dress, in an empty room save for a couple of chairs and a table,” he said. “We smiled at each other, exchanged pleasantries. I asked her how she was and what she had been doing. I eventually asked her the question that I had been asked to put to her: ‘Are you working on biological warfare?’ She said, ‘No, we have stopped all that and stopped it for some time,’” he said. He was then taken back to the airport and questioned by British agents. “I just said to [the agents] that I had got nothing from that, but I imagine that they would think that she would say that anyway,” Gibson said. “Thinking back, we were not going to get any answer that could be relied on anyway, but I didn’t feel as if I was being lied to,” he said (Rajeev Syal, The Times, March 14).
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