BRUSSELS -- Baroness Emma Nicholson, a British MEP and deputy chairman of the European Parliament's Foreign Relations Committee, has denounced the Iranian MKO as a 'criminals' who form a private army for Saddam Hussein and called for a stop to their activities.

"The risk of terrorism is omnipresent now. The dour and brooding presence of sudden unanticipated and violent death hangs over the military and civilians alike, in all our nations.

"But there is a much better established, older terrorist organization working inside Iraq since 1986; the MKO, or MEK as they are known inside the USA," Nicholson told the EP in plenary debate on Iraq in Strasbourg Wednesday evening.

"The MKO have thousands of members inside Iraq and thousands outside, financed, equipped, armed, trained by the Iraqi Army, and fully engaged militarily since 1986 in all of Saddam's many wars.

"Links have been found recently between the Al-Qaeda network and northern Iraq's, pro-Saddam forces fighting the free Kurdish people," she said.

The USA froze MEK assets in 1994, declaring the group under its many aliases to be an international terrorist organization. The EU followed the U.S. example in 2001, IRNA reported.

Yet last week ***The New York Times ***published a full page advertisement for the MEK using congressional names and photographs and claiming congressional support, noted the MEP.

"Here, our debates on Iraq have been attended by known members of the MKO recently. These people are a threat to world security. Their organization strikes silently and with lethal impact.

"This is Saddam's private, international terrorist army, working against us all.

"Whatever our differences on the future treatment of Iraq, for the sake of our citizens and for global safety I urge far greater security attention is paid to the MKO.

"War or no war, the criminals who make up the MKO kill and destroy the innocent. They must be stopped," she stressed.