UK politician rebuffs US paper's Iraq cash apology

A radical British politician close to Saddam Hussein's old government refused yesterday to accept an apology from an American newspaper which retracted a claim he had received $10 million to promote Iraq in the West.

The Christian Science Monitor said documents from Baghdad - on which its April 25 report about left-wing legislator George Galloway were based - were "almost certainly forgeries."

"We apologise to Mr Galloway and to our readers," the Boston-based publication's editor Paul Van Slambrouck said in comments on the newspaper's website.

But Galloway, one of Britain's most outspoken campaigners against the Iraq war and past Western sanctions on Baghdad, said he would press on with a libel case against the Monitor.

"The last two months have been a walking nightmare so I just can't accept an apology like this," he said.

"The basic checks on the authenticity of these documents which they have now made should have been done before they were published on the front of an internationally renowned paper."

Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper also accused Galloway in April of taking at least 375,000 pounds ($628,000) a year in pay-offs from the Iraqi government. He denies that too and says he is also planning to sue the Telegraph.

Galloway was suspended from the ruling Labour Party in May for calling Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush "wolves", among other colourful criticisms, in interviews during the war.

The Scottish legislator - attacked in Britain's right-wing press as a "traitor" and mocked as "the MP for Baghdad Central" for his trips to Iraq and meetings with Saddam and other senior Iraqis - called on Blair to launch an investigation into who was behind "this conspiracy to politically assassinate me."