Is this the man who gave Blair the cue for 45-minute WMD claim?

[T_i_B]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=493879

A former Iraqi general who disappeared from Denmark three days before the beginning of the war to oust Saddam Hussein is thought to be the man who passed on the notorious "45-minute" claim to British intelligence.

Nizar al-Khazraji, in his mid-60s, was the most senior military man to defect from the Iraqi regime. A Sunni Muslim former combat general with considerable support among the officer corps, he was considered by the CIA to be a potential replacement for Saddam if the army staged a coup.

General Khazraji was chief of staff during the war with Iran in the 1980s, but fell from favour with the dictator, apparently for advising him against the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He fled to Kurdish-held northern Iraq in 1995 and applied for political asylum in Denmark in 1999, after spending time in Syria and Jordan. But on 17 March last year he vanished, escaping a war crimes investigation, amid reports that he had been spirited away by the CIA.

The claim that Saddam could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so was the most dramatic and controversial in the Government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It has since emerged that the information came from "an established and reliable source" who had been reporting to MI6 for some years, in the words of the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw - but he was acting as an intermediary for a serving officer in the Iraqi army, and had no means of checking it himself.