posted 08-03-2003 01:11 PM            

Sunday, August 3, 2003

(08-03) 07:39 PDT NIAMEY, Niger (AP) --

Niger's president demanded the U.N. nuclear agency exonerate it of any claims it had any uranium dealings with Iraq, a widely discounted accusation included in President Bush state of the union address.

Ahead of the U.S.-led of invasion of Iraq, Bush said British intelligence possessed a document showing that Iraq had approached Niger to obtain uranium. The claim was used to suggest Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

U.N. officials have called the document a forgery, and Bush administration officials have since said it should not have been cited in the president's speech.

"This affair represents nothing other than accusations without foundation," Niger President Mamadou Tandja said in a televised address late Saturday in the arid West African nation.

The Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency should "publicly wash Niger of all suspicions before the U.N. Security Council," Tandja declared.

"Without that, our country can only remain harmed and hampered by a situation in which it isn't implicated in any way," Tandja said in the speech, which marked the 43rd anniversary of Niger's independence from France.

The U.N. agency said Sunday it had not heard from the president and that it did not have an official response yet to his comments.

"It's an unusual request," a spokeswoman for the agency, Melissa Fleming, said in Vienna. "We'd have to get it formally in writing and then see what we would do with it."

Fleming pointed to a March 7 statement to the Security Council in which the agency's chief said the charges against Niger were unfounded.