More than half a dozen countries on the IAEA’s 35-nation governing board, which meets on Sept. 19, believe there is no justification for a referral, they said.

“I think unanimity may be impossible,” one European diplomat told Reuters. “Pakistan and Brazil have basically given us a definitive ‘no’. “Several other countries will also be difficult to convince.” “China and Russia will be difficult,” another EU diplomat said, adding that without Beijing and Moscow the plan to ratchet up the pressure on Tehran might fail. The United States and the European Union want the IAEA to refer Iran to the Security Council after it resumed uranium processing at its Isfahan plant last month, effectively ending talks with the EU on giving up its nuclear program.

"The British and American bomber pilots came, unopposed, safe and cosy in their state of the art aircraft, pressing buttons to drop bombs, to kill and maim.

"And these murderers, for that is what they are, would go back to celebrate 'mission accomplished'.

"Who are the terrorists? The people below who were bombed or the bombers? Whose rights have been snatched away?"

Dr Mahathir also turned on Western human rights campaigners, who he said had ignored the plight of the Iraqi people during a decade of sanctions that followed the first Gulf war.

With six days to go until Germans vote, Mrs Merkel's Christian Democratic party (CDU) is still ahead with 40.5%. But Mr Schröder's Social Democrats have gone up to 34.5% after an unexpected comeback in the final stages of the campaign.

Together, Germany's left parties now have 49.5% of the vote, compared with 47.7% for Mrs Merkel's coalition, according to the Emnid institute poll. The gap is enough to stop Mrs Merkel forming a centre-right government with the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the CSU, and junior coalition partner the FDP.

The most significant outcome of the Gleneagles Summit was widely acknowledged as the promise of doubling of aid to Africa - an extra $25-billion by 2010. Japan has now admitted that part of the money it had pledged at Gleneagles would almost certainly be used to reduce debt in Iraq, Lewis said, a development which he said "took my breath away".

The money promised at Gleneagles to Africa was not expected to "suddenly be siphoned off to pay debts, and certainly not Iraqi debt". The new Iraq regime has a $200-billion debt burden.

Making matters worse, Germany and Italy have announced they might not meet the commitments they made at Gleneagles due to "budgetary constraints", and British finance minister Gordon Brown, 11 days after the summit, admitted that the extra money for aid promised by the G8 leaders included the extra money promised for debt relief.

Even now, the British are still playing games with the Iranians. Only this week, the government has supplied armoured vests to the regime for "anti-narcotics" operations against opium coming out of Afghanistan. Ludicrously, the foreign minister Chris Mullin stated that the Iranians had guaranteed that they would not transfer them to the armed forces of the Islamic Republic.