Beirut, Lebanon ? The father of Iraq’s nuclear bomb program denied Monday that Saddam Hussein tried to restart his atomic activities.

Jafar Dhia Jafar also called for a U.N. probe of what its inspectors knew before the U.S.-led invasion. Inspectors “reached total conviction” that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons yet failed to convey that to the Security Council because of U.S. pressure, he said.

Before the invasion last March, chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and his nuclear counterpart Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said their teams found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction or programs to build them, but needed more time to make a definitive conclusion.