NEW YORK: American arms pollsters have found that Egypt secretly supplied crucial help - both technology and expert manpower - to the chemical weapons program of Saddam's Iraq in the 1980s.

According to the CIA's Iraq Survey Group Egyptian specialists helped the Iraqis make "technological leaps" on poison gas at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, when Baghdad used nerve agents to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers and Iranian and Iraqi civilians.

The US report is the most authoritative and detailed since such collaboration between the Arab nations was first rumored in the late 1980s.

Cairo rejected those earlier allegations, and Egypt's Washington embassy reiterated that denial when asked by The Associated Press about the CIA report saying, “Egypt had no relation whatsoever with Iraq in the field of chemical weapons.”

But in AP interviews, United Nations arms inspectors who scoured Iraq's files and facilities in the 1990s corroborated the US finding.

From 1983 to 1988, the Iraqis repeatedly used mustard gas, tabun, sarin and possibly other chemical agents against the Iranians. Most notoriously, in 1988, Iraqi aircraft dropped sarin and mustard gas on Iranian-held villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, leaving more than 5,000 Iraqi Kurdish civilians dead.     

World physicians’ forum demands probe in Iraq war civilian toll PARIS, France: International group of top public-health physicians has termed the official toll of civilian dead from the Iraq war as a serious miscalculate demanding an independent probe to establish the full casualty figures.