US Vice-President Dick Cheney repeated assertions on Sunday on links between the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda despite a recent Senate intelligence committee report that concluded otherwise.

In defending the decision to invade Iraq despite its lack of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Cheney said the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a US air strike this year, was in Baghdad before the war was evidence that Iraq had links to al-Qaeda.