Saddam Hussein yesterday replaced Amer Mohammad Rasheed, his close confidant and Iraq's long-time oil minister. The reshuffle was prompted by Mr Rasheed's close ties to Iraq's weapons programme, former Iraqi officials and analysts said.

Mr Rasheed, a British-educated engineer and Iraq's oil minister since 1995, is to be replaced by Sameer Aziz al-Najim, one of Mr Hussein's closest associates and a hardline Baath party regional commander and former Iraqi ambassador, with little background in oil.

"Saddam Hussein is now consolidating his power and putting those around him who can be fully trusted to carry out his orders," Muhammad-Ali Zainy, an Iraqi energy analyst at the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies, said.

According to Iraqi officials, the removal of Mr Rasheed, 64, is because he has passed Iraq's mandatory retirement age of 63. But others put his removal down to the desire of the Iraqi leadership to distance itself from main figures in the munitions industry as the UN's weapons inspectors speed up their search for non-conventional weapons.

Mr Rasheed served as right-hand man to Hussein Kamel, the Iraqi minister of arms procurement and Mr Hussein's son-in-law, who defected to Jordan in 1995. Much of what UN inspectors know about Iraq's weapons programmes is based on Mr Kamel's testimony, for which he was killed in 1996.

Before his elevation to oil minister, Mr Rasheed ran the commission for military industrialisation and was one of the last Iraqis to be questioned by the UN inspection team before it withdrew from Iraq in 1998.

His former wife, the biological weapons scientist Dr Rihab Taba, 47, is alleged to have worked on germs that cause botulism poisoning.