Iraq 'paid Galloway millions as reward'

MP George Galloway today faced an extraordinary new claim that he was paid more than £6million by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

A new cache of documents reportedly found in Iraq is said to detail six payments to Mr Galloway between 1992 and January this year amounting in all to more than $10 million.

Mr Galloway has already denied taking any cash from the regime. He has begun legal action against the Daily Telegraph over its earlier report of documents alleging he was paid some £375,000 a year out of the country's oil revenues.

That charge is dwarfed by the claim in the Boston-based newspaper the Christian Science Monitor.

The paper says the new documents - one apparently authorised by Saddam's son Qusay - were discovered in a house outside Baghdad. They were unearthed, bizarrely, by an Iraqi general who broke into the house in the chaos of the war in an attempt to reclaim some property deeds confiscated from him by the regime.

One document, dated only three months ago, is said to authorise a payment of $3million, saying the money was a reward for the MP's "courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq like Blair, the British Prime Minister, and for his opposition in the House of Commons and Lords against all outrageous lies against our patient people".

There was no immediate response to the latest claim from Mr Galloway but he has already denounced all charges of payment as a smear levelled in retaliation for his strong support for Iraq and his opposition to war.

Mr Galloway faced problems on a different front with news that the Mariam Appeal, which he set up to give medical aid to an Iraqi girl, is to be investigated by the Charity Commission.

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, announced that the commission would begin "further fact-finding" into charges that the appeal used "charitable funds for non-charitable purposes". The appeal was set up in 1998 to pay for leukaemia treatment for four-year-old Mariam Hamza, but critics have said that it was unclear how much of the money raised went to her or, as promised, was sent back to Iraq in medicines and medical supplies.

The appeal, now wound up, was not a registered charity but the Charity Commission has powers to investigate because it operated like one.