RIYADH, 2 August — Saudi Arabia yesterday brushed aside as “unfounded lies” Iraqi accusations that the Kingdom was maltreating Iraqi refugees living in a border camp since the 1991 Gulf War.

“The claims of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry are unfounded lies and falsifications,” the official Saudi Press Agency quoted a Defense Ministry official as saying.

On Sunday, Baghdad appealed to the refugees to return home and accused the Saudi authorities of “inhuman and immoral practices” against more than 5,000 Iraqis living in the Rafha camp in northern Saudi Arabia.

“The attention and decent treatment being received by Iraqi refugees in Saudi Arabia are unique in the world, as acknowledged by the refugees themselves and by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,” the official said.

“The Iraqi refugees are free to return to Iraq or settle in any other country which accepts them,” the official said.

More than 5,200 refugees remain at Rafha out of a total of more than 33,000 Iraqis who were housed in the camp when it was set up after the Kuwait liberation war, according to UN figures.

The camp was built near the Iraqi border to take in refugees from Iraq at the end of the war.

Dozens of refugees staged a hunger strike in June to draw world attention to their plight, protesting at “the uncertainty over their future” since a program to settle the refugees in third countries was broken off in 1997. Most of the refugees have started new lives in the United States, Britain, Canada and the Scandinavian countries, or returned to Iraq.

The Saudi Defense Ministry official said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had representatives in the camp and that the refugees were free to leave.

Some 3,000 have voluntarily returned to Iraq, while about 25,000 have moved to Europe, Australia or North America, the UNHCR said. Most of the refugees still in Saudi Arabia have been refusing to return home, despite financial incentives of up to $2,700.

Iraq denies firing missile: In Baghdad, a senior Iraqi MP charged yesterday that the United States was cooking up excuses to attack his country and denied a Pentagon accusation that a missile had been fired into Saudi airspace.

“Such allegations are meant to justify a new aggression against Iraq,” Salem Al-Kobeissi, chairman of parliament’s Arab and international relations committee, said.