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Evidence fingers Iran on Iraqi militant bombs: US

Serial numbers and other markings on bombs suggest that Iranians are linked to deadly explosives used by Iraqi militants, US Defense Secre-tary Robert Gates said in one of Washington's first public assertions about evidence the military has collected.

While the administration of US President George W. Bush and military officials have repeatedly said Iranians have been tied to terrorist bombings in Iraq, they have said little about evidence to bolster such claims, including any documents and other items collected in recent raids in Iraq.

National security officials in Washington and Iraq have been working for weeks on a presentation intended to provide evidence for Bush administration claims of what they say are Iran's meddlesome and deadly activities.

Iran responded by saying the US was trying to fabricate Iran's involvement in attacks on US troops in Iraq, Iran's ambassador to the UN said in a radio interview aired on Friday.

Javad Zarif said on US National Public Radio's All Things Considered program that Iran has "no interest" in providing weapons to any insurgent group in Iraq.

"But the problem is that the United States has decided on a policy and is trying to find or fabricate evidence if it cannot find one -- and I believe it hasn't been able to find evidence -- in order to substantiate and corroborate that policy," Zarif said.

The materials -- which in their classified form include slides and some two inches of documents -- provide evidence of Iran's role in supplying Iraqi militants with highly sophisticated and lethal improvised explosive devices and other weaponry.

Among the weapons is a roadside bomb known as an "explosively formed penetrator," which can pierce the armor of Abrams tanks with nearly molten-hot charges.

One intelligence official said the US is "fairly comfortable" that it knows with some precision the origin of the Iranian-made explosives.

The Iran dossier also lays out alleged Iranian efforts to train Iraqis in military techniques.

Yet, government officials say there is some disagreement about how much to make public to support the administration's case. Intelligence officials worry the sources of their information could dry up.

Among the evidence the administration will present are weapons that were seized in US-led raids on caches around Iraq, one military official in Washington said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Other evidence includes documents captured when US-led forces raided an Iranian office Jan. 11 in Irbil in northern Iraq, the official said. Tehran said it was a government liaison office, but the US military said five Iranians detained in the raid were connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.

The assertions have been met with skepticism by some lawmakers still fuming over intelligence reports used by the administration to propel the country to war with Iraq in 2003. Gates' comments came as a new Pentagon inspector general's report criticized prewar Defense Department assertions of al-Qaeda connections to Iraq.

Speaking with reporters in Seville, Spain, on Friday before he traveled to Munich, Gates told reporters that markings on explosives provide "pretty good" evidence that Iranians are supplying either weapons or technology for Iraqi extremists.

"I think there's some serial numbers, there may be some markings on some of the projectile fragments that we found" that point to Iran, he said.

Gates' remarks left unclear how the US knows the serial numbers can be traced to Iran and whether such weapons would have been sent to Iraq by the Iranian government or delivered by private arms dealers.

Explosives have been a leading killer of US forces in Iraq, where more than 3,000 US troops have died in the nearly four-year-old war.
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