NEW YORK — Egypt secretly supplied crucial help — both technology and expert manpower — to the chemical-weapons program of Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, U.S. arms investigators have found.

In 1981, after the outbreak of war with Iran, Saddam's government paid Egypt $12 million "in return for assistance with production and storage of chemical-weapons agents," the U.S. weapons hunters say in a little-noticed annex of their Comprehensive Report, a 350,000-word document issued last October.

The CIA's Iraq Survey Group says Egyptian specialists helped the Iraqis make "technological leaps" on poison gas at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, when Baghdad used nerve agents to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers and Iranian and Iraqi civilians.

The U.S. report is the most authoritative and detailed since such collaboration between the Arab nations was first rumored in the late 1980s.

The Cairo government rejected those earlier allegations, and Egypt's Washington embassy reiterated that denial when asked about the CIA report. But U.N. arms inspectors who scoured Iraq's files and facilities in the 1990s corroborated the U.S. finding.

Like former enemy Israel, Egypt has long been believed to possess chemical weapons. Experts say there's strong evidence Egyptian warplanes repeatedly used mustard-gas bombs against royalist forces during Cairo's intervention in the Yemen civil war of the 1960s.

Bulgaria says GIs admit rule violation in killing

SOFIA, Bulgaria — U.S. forces have admitted they broke their rules of engagement last week when a unit fired on a Bulgarian patrol, killing a soldier, the Bulgarian Defense Ministry said yesterday.

"The U.S. side has established that U.S. troops ... did not put enough effort into identifying the objects moving on the road and, without warning shots, as regulated, opened fire," the ministry said in a statement.

A U.S.-led investigation showed the American soldiers were on high alert when they accidentally shot and killed Gurdi Gurdev on March 4. Insurgents had just attacked two other units nearby, it said.

A spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad said he could not comment on the statement. "It would be inappropriate to comment until the investigation is complete," he said.

The shooting happened at night after the Bulgarians had fired warning shots to halt a vehicle near the U.S. position.

Gurdev, the eighth Bulgarian soldier to die since the start of the war, was killed nearly at the same time as U.S. forces shot dead an Italian intelligence agent as he was taking freed hostage journalist Giuliana Sgrena to safety.

Dispute over report of 15 headless bodies

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi authorities yesterday disputed reports that 15 headless bodies were found south of Baghdad last week.

However, Iraqi Defense Ministry and army officials who were the original sources for the reports insisted — when contacted again yesterday — that the decapitated bodies had been found.

The Government Communications Directorate's Media Relations office said in an English-language announcement that "official sources in the ministries of Defense, Interior and Health deny the news that some of mass media reported regarding finding 15 bodies beheaded in Latifiya."

An official in the Media Relations office refused to expand on the statement.

Defense Ministry Capt. Sabah Yassin and Capt. Fatiq Ayed, of the Iraqi Army's 50th regiment that is responsible for the region where the bodies were found, said that a patrol of the regiment found the corpses March 8 inside an abandoned base of the former Iraqi army in Latifiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

Ukraine's exit begins as 150 troops pull out

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Ukraine withdrew 150 servicemen from Iraq yesterday, beginning a gradual pullout.

The Ukrainian company that was based near Suwayrah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, left Iraq and was expected to return home by Tuesday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.

This month, President Viktor Yushchenko and top defense officials ordered a phased withdrawal of Ukraine's 1,650-strong contingent from the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Ukraine has lost 17 soldiers in Iraq and the deployment is deeply unpopular among people in the former Soviet republic.

3 policemen shot down in funeral procession

MOSUL, Iraq — Gunmen killed three policemen and wounded a fourth at a funeral procession yesterday. It was the second time in three days that mourners have been targeted in that northern city.

It was unclear if the mourners were Shiites, but the police officers were participating in a procession for a colleague's wife and two children who died in a roadside bomb attack a day earlier, policeman Ammar Hussein said.

Insurgents led by Sunni Arabs, a minority that was dominant under Saddam Hussein, are targeting Shiite funeral processions and ceremonies in an apparent campaign to spark a sectarian war. At least 50 people were killed Thursday in a suicide car-bomb attack on a Shiite funeral.

ALSO

"Possible mistreatment" by soldiers of two Iraqi civilians detained by American troops last month is under investigation, the military said yesterday. The civilians received minor injuries while being transported to a detention facility during an operation on Feb. 27.

Insurgents blew up two oil pipelines yesterday, one near Samarra and the other in the area near Riyadh, a town close to Kirkuk.