Dr Germ - and the Poisons of Death

January 23, 2003
by Gordon Thomas

They call her Dr Germ - the most dangerous woman terrorist Britain has ever faced.

MI5 believe she prepared the deadly ricin threat that has terrified Britain - along with the possibility of equally lethal poisons waiting to be released against this country.

Iraqi Dr Rihad Taha spent over five years at one of Britain's top universities researching plant poisons. She had access to work done at Porton Down. She returned home to become head of Saddam's biological warfare programme.

MI5 now believe she left behind with sleeper terrorist agents in Britain, the blueprint for a germ factory based on all she studied at the University of East Anglia.

"There is credible evidence the sleepers passed on the plans to even more dangerous fanatics - who have entered Britain under the guise of asylum seekers. Some of them may be scientists briefed by Taha before coming here," said an intelligence source.

Labour MP Andrew MacKinley expressed the concern of many politicians last week when he said "there are many hundreds of foreign scientists in this country and we don't have the foggiest idea what they are doing here".
In the desperate search to discover the germ factory before it spreads its deadly poisons, raids were carried out in Bournemouth and Manchester.

The factory is believed to be hidden in one of the safe houses bin Laden is now feared to have established in Britain. Traces of ricin were found the previous week in a London flat.

As the unprecedented hunt continues to discover the lethal factory, the Sunday Express has uncovered the story of Dr Germ.

Barely five feet tall with a pinched face and skinny figure, she is the eldest daughter of one of the ruling families in Iraq.

She lives in a mansion close to one of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad. She is married to Amer Rashid, Iraq's oil minister - himself an Oxford graduate.

An MI5 report reveals that while she was pregnant with her first child she "spent the months studying means of how to infect Western babies with lethal doses of diarrhoea".

Mossad's dossier on Dr Germ details her terminal experiments on Saddam's prisoners with anthrax, botulism and ricin. The experiments are the by-product of her studies in this country.

She came to Britain in 1979, arriving on a First Class ticket with Iraqi Airlines from Baghdad. In her suitcases were Armani suits and designer jeans from Paris.

Taha took a taxi to the campus in Norwich. No one thought this remarkable. Foreign students were free-spenders.

Dr Germ had enrolled to study crop diseases. She was 23 years-old, a mousey-haired girl with an unattractive habit of chewing flower stalks. It had already turned her teeth yellow.

No one suspected she was a fanatical member of Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party. No one noticed at the time her sudden weekend visits to London to meet her Iraqi intelligence controller.

At that time Saddam was anything but a threat to Britain. It was the activities of the Ayatollah of Tehran which worried the intelligence services.

Taha would sit long into the night in her bedsit in Norwich's Earlhan Road. Fellow students were impressed by her dedication - even if they found her arrogance off-putting. And they were sympathetic when her end-of-term exam results were disappointing.

No one suspected that flunking was a deliberate ploy to ensure she would stay on at the university to continue her degree course.

Away from the classroom, her studies were of a very different kind. Her course enabled her to access restricted papers, some from Porton Down. These showed her how to distribute anthrax, botulism, bubonic plague - and other toxins in the biology of doom arsenal.

She learned how deadly germs could be sprayed in shopping centres and bomblets spewing anthrax spores over a sports arena. She discovered that little more than the equipment used in a Sixth Form science lab is sufficient to produce a bio weapon.

Towards the end of her stay in Britain, MI5 now know Dr Germ - the nickname was coined for her by the former UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekus - began to visit Islamic groups in London and the north of England.

When Taha returned to Iraq in 1984, with a degree in microbiology, she had established contacts she would carefully nurture.

She quickly came to the attention of General Amer Saadi - a graduate from Oxford with a master's degree in chemistry. He was in overall charge of Saddam's secret biological research programme.

Taha joined the small team of British trained Iraqi graduates who spearheaded the programme.

Later some of her contacts in Britain were invited by her to visit Baghdad.

By then she had abandoned her smart clothes for the battle fatigues Saddam favours. Her hair had been hennaed the colour of the Euphrates which flows past her home.

She has been publicly honoured by Saddam and made head of her work in biological warfare.

In the years of slavishly trying to find new means to kill innocent millions, Taha has developed a terrifying temper - once threatening to lock a subordinate in a test box and release germs into it.

Today, a scrawny 46 year-old, she has earned not only an odious nickname - Dr Germ - but an honour she will not like.

Pentagon analyst Brian Anderson says that in the list of targets for the coming war with Iraq, "there is only one name ahead of Taha's - Saddam Hussein".

If captured, Dr Germ will face a war crime trial. But the likelihood is that she will commit suicide with one of her own germs.

In MI5's dossier, she takes up more space than either of Saddam's two sons.
Meantime, foreign scientists from countries known to support terrorism continue to have ready access to Britain's leading laboratories and university campuses.

MI5 do not discount that some of those students are here to exploit the legacy of Dr Germ - and launch a terrifying biological war on this country.

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