Colonel Tim Collins is expected to be cleared of allegations of war crimes in Iraq by an army inquiry. Officers from the Special Investigation Branch are believed to have concluded that charges made against Col Collins by an American reservist, Major Re Biastre, were based on hearsay and could not be corroborated.The investigation, due to be completed next month, will report to the Army Prosecuting Authority, which in turn will report to the Attorney General. A Ministry of Defence source said: "Nothing has been found to support claims that Colonel Collins contravened the Geneva Convention or committed any crimes or indeed broke the rules of conflict."Col Collins, 43, was accused by Major Biastre, in a five-page statement, of mistreating prisoners of war, pistol-whipping a Baath party official and shooting the tyres of a looter's lorry.Major Biastre has admitted he did not witness any of the incidents but heard them mentioned while waiting outside Col Collins' office. He reported them to his US Army superiors who passed them on to their British counterparts.Major Biastre also complained that British troops had referred to President George Bush as a "cowboy", and to Tony Blair as his "poodle", and stated that the vast majority of British people opposed the war.A number of Major Biastre's colleagues in the US forces have offered to give evidence on behalf of Col Collins if he faced official charges. One of them, Major Stan Coerr, said he would serve with the colonel "anywhere, anytime". Major Coerr, who led a 14-strong American detachment serving alongside the Royal Irish, added: "This [allegation] is an absolute travesty.".

British forces in Iraq suffered from lack of air support because RAF planes were being used in American operations, the Conservatives claimed yesterday. I think it is entirely natural that they would regard their main effort as the attack on Baghdad and that the slow and painstaking approach to Basra by the British forces was a secondary issue to them, and I think that is perfectly understandable."My criticism is whether it is right for British forces to pool our air support with the coalition as a whole rather than to maintain dedicated close air support with our own forces."The Americans both with their Marines and their infantry, the two-pronged attack on Baghdad, were fighting as land-air systems - that is, the air component was an integrated part of the land attack."That was not the case with the British in Basra and I think there is an important lesson to be learned from that situation. Because while some air strikes came in in a very timely manner ... When Ann Clwyd missed key Commons votes in 1995 because she was on the Iraqi border witnessing the plight of the Kurds, Tony Blair sacked her as a foreign affairs frontbencher. Ms Clwyd, who travels for talks in Kuwait before heading to Iraq for a two-week fact-finding trip, was the most prominent advocate of war on Labour's left, passionately arguing the case for toppling Saddam.Yesterday she said that restoring security to Iraq was of "paramount" importance and backed calls for a force of up to 100,000 troops to maintain order and begin the country's reconstruction She said: "I think things are getting better every day.

But there are challenges, for instance more progress has got to be made in restoring water, power and health services in many areas, [and] maintaining law and order.Security is of paramount importance."Mr Blair approached Ms Clwyd, 66, last Wednesday in a private meeting before his weekly talks with Labour's backbench committee. He asked her to give him reports on the human rights situation in Iraq as fresh evidence emerges of mass gravesoutside Baghdad and other Iraqi towns.Ms Clwyd has campaigned against human rights abuses in Iraq for 25 years, and since 1996 has chaired the pressure group Indict, which documents evidence of torture and crimes by Saddam's regime to build the case for bringing the former dictator to the international war crimes tribunal.Her consistent campaigning against the Iraqi regime won her respect from colleagues, even those on the left of the Labour Party who strongly opposed military action.She said yesterday she planned to ensure evidence was preserved so that leaders of Saddam's regime could be brought to trial. But she said she would also bring Mr Blair news of the plight of ordinary Iraqis as they struggled to rebuild their country.She said: "I supported the war for humanitarian reasons all along. I would still support it for those reasons, because they were so obvious.". The Government was accused of hypocrisy yesterday for allowing arms sales worth £16m to central African nations embroiled in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They have been caught up in fighting that has paralysed the country since the 1990s.The Government - which announced last week that it was considering joining a peace-keeping force planned for the north-eastern DRC - said that careful checks were made on arms exports to central Africa to ensure they could not make their way to the DRC.But critics said that the sales were underminilng government promises to apply an "ethical dimension" to foreign policy - and warned it would be impossible to keep track of the equipment once it had arrived in central Africa.In 1999, sales to the region included £3m of body armour and helmets to Angola and armoured vehicles to Uganda.

The following year, UK companies sold £1m of body armour and assault rifles to Namibia and £1m of military vehicles to Zimbabwe.In 2001, the most recent year for which arms sales figures were released, Angola bought £8m of military and armoured vehicles, while machine pistols and weapon-cleaning equipment was sent to Uganda.Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP and campaigner on the crisis in the DRC, said: "This makes claims of an ethical policy a sham The Government has been hypocritical on this issue. We are talking about four and a half million African lives that have been lost over five years and British companies are profiting from it. There's blood on the Government's hands over this."A spokesman for Amnesty International said: "The fact that the UK has relatively recently licensed the export of armoured vehicles to Angola and Uganda - two nations heavily involved in Africa's so-called world war - raises fresh questions about the Government's ability to properly regulate the arm trade."The question that should be asked is - can the British Government account for the whereabouts of its equipment and can it guarantee it has not fallen into the hands of warring militias committing massacres in eastern Congo?"A spokesman for Saferworld, an anti-arms sales pressure group, said the granting of licences proved the need for tougher scrutiny of the weapons trade. "It is encouraging that the Government are considering sending troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo as an effective peace-keeping force is desperately needed. This must be backed up, though, by tougher arms export controls," he said.The Foreign Office has said that each licence granted was checked against the risk that the arms could be used in internal suppression or external aggression.