Jesper Larsen and Michael Bjerre, who work for conservative daily Berlingske Tidende, are charged with illegally publishing classified reports written by Denmark's military intelligence agency FE for the government which questioned whether former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein posed a real threat before the war.

"They were questioned, then indicted," criminal police inspector Ove Dahl told AFP. They have both pleaded innocent, he said.

The Danish government was a strong ally of the United States in the war on Iraq and has repeatedly insisted that the existence of an illicit weapons arsenal there justified the military strike that was launched in March 2003.

But in January, FE agent Frank Soeholm Grevil leaked a number of reports to Larsen and Bjerre which stated that "no reliable information on operational weapons of mass destruction" existed in Iraq.

According to Grevil, Denmark's military intelligence had submitted a dozen reports to the government, none of which supported the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Larsen and Bjerre published the information in Berlingske Tidende on February 22.

Grevil, who was fired from his job in March, said he leaked the documents because he did not like the way the intelligence reports he had helped write were interpreted by the government.

Among other things, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the Danish parliament before the start of the war that he was convinced Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

"This is not something we just believe. We know," he said.

Rasmussen's government has for months been under intense pressure to explain the real motives behind the US-led war since no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the official end of the war in May

The European Federation of Journalists has protested to the Danish government against its handling of the matter and warned that it will take the matter to the European Court of Human Rights if the journalists are not freed.

Last week, Danish Defence Minister Svend Aage Jensby resigned after coming under fire for revealing confidential details of a parliamentary enquiry into intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

WAR.WIRE