Belfast, Oct 24: Prime Minister Tony Blair is "lying through his teeth" about having detailed knowledge of the Irish Republican Army`s latest weapons handover, Protestant leaders charged after meeting the disarmament chief for Northern Ireland on Thursday. John De Chastelain, a retired Canadian General assigned to disarm the IRA and other outlawed groups, agreed to meet three Protestant parties - all of them opponents of the 1998 peace accord here - two days after he scrapped an unknown volume of IRA weaponry in a secret location.
Tuesday`s IRA move had been timed to promote Protestant support for reviving a catholic-Protestant administration for this British territory following a November 26 legislative election, but the gesture failed. The key Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, demanded more detail on what weapons had been surrendered, how much weaponry the IRA retained, and how much longer the whole process was likely to take - all information that De Chastelain said he couldn`t make public.
Blair yesterday repeated his view that the Northern Ireland public would be impressed by the latest IRA move if they could be told the volume and type of weaponry offered - information that the British leader suggests De Chastelain told him in private. But delegations from IAN Paisley`s Democratic Unionists and two smaller hard-line Protestant parties said De Chastelain told them he hadn`t passed any special information to Blair. Bureau Report