Czech intelligence: Saddam ordered Prague attack

Nov 30, 2009, 12:28 GMT

Prague - Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered an attack on US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, both based in Prague, the Czech intelligence service said Monday.

A statement posted on the Security Information Service (BIS) website said Iraqi agents plotted to hit the building with a rocket- propelled grenade from an apartment across the street.

An informer based at the Iraqi embassy in Prague first told the security service in 2000 that Saddam ordered an attack that would 'violently disrupt the Iraqi broadcasts,' BIS spokesman Jan Subert said.

Two years later the informer said Iraqi agents planned to attack the radio station from an apartment window at the adjacent Washingtonova street, Subert said.

The agency said it prevented the attack by involving the Czech Foreign Ministry that expelled an Iraqi diplomat, allegedly a senior Iraqi spy.

Following another lead in 2003, a cache of pistols, Kalashnikovs and a RPG-7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade and ammunition stocked at the embassy was handed to Czech police three weeks after Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed, the spokesman said.

The US-financed radio station moved its headquarters from Munich, Germany, to Prague in 1994 and launched its Iraqi service in 1998.

After the terrorist attacks on New York City's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the Czech army and police were heavily guarding the radio station located in a Communist-era Czechoslovak parliament building in central Prague.

Subert said that the Czech intelligence service decided to declassify the case after the station moved earlier this year to a new heavily-secured building outside the centre of Prague.

Details of the abortive attack were disclosed days before the Czech parliament's lower house discusses the government's state budget draft for 2010, which aims to cut BIS funding by 55.7 million koruny (3.2 million dollars) or 4.4 per cent compared to 2009.