US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday accused Syria of carrying out tests involving chemical weapons over the past 12 to 15 months and allowing some Iraqis to flee into Syrian territory.Further increasing US pressure on Iraq’s neighbour, Rumsfeld said the US has ‘‘intelligence that indicates that some Iraqi people have been allowed into Syria, in some cases to stay and some cases to transit.’’ Rumsfeld did not identify the Iraqis to which he was referring.‘‘I would say that we have seen chemical weapons tests in Syria over the past 12-15 months,’’ he said, but did not give any details.Joining Rumsfeld was White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who denounced Syria as ‘‘indeed a rogue nation’’.Meanwhile, top British officials said on Monday that Washington and London had no plans to invade Syria, but Damascus had ‘‘important questions’’ to answer about its own weapons programmes. ‘‘As far as ‘Syria next on the list’, we made clear that it is not,’’ Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told reporters in Bahrain during a Gulf Arab tour. ‘‘There is no ‘next’ list,’’ he said.Straw earlier told BBC Radio that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had assured Parliament last week that he knew of no plans for military action against Syria now that US and British forces had invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein. ‘‘There is much evidence of considerable cooperation between the Syrian government and the Saddam regime in recent months,’’ Straw told a news conference in Kuwait, the second stop of a tour that will also take in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.Syria denied it had chemical weapons or that it had ever cooperated with Saddam’s administration. ‘‘We say to him (President Bush) that Syria has no chemical weapons and that the only chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the region are in Israel, which is threatening its neighbours and occupying their land,’’ foreign ministry spokeswoman Buthaina Shaaban said. ‘‘There was never any cooperation between Damascus and Baghdad,’’ she added.Like Israel, Damascus is not a party to the international convention banning chemical weapons and so is under no legal constraint.London has dispatched Foreign Office Minister Mike O’Briento Damascus, where he is due to hold talks with Syrian officials.Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, speaking to reporters in London, would not say explicitly if Britain believed Syria had chemical weapons, but said London had concerns about ‘‘efforts they have made certainly in the past’’.
