UN Arms Inspectors Revisit Two Suspected Sites in Iraq

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, December 09, 2002

UN Arms Inspectors Revisit Two Suspected Sites in Iraq

UN arms inspectors on Monday returned to a military industrial complex and a nuclear facility that they had inspected since they resumed searches for banned weapons in Iraq two weeks ago.

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UN arms inspectors on Monday returned to a military industrial complex and a nuclear facility that they had inspected since they resumed searches for banned weapons in Iraq two weeks ago.

The inspection team from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) went to the large Tareq military industrial complex, about 85 km northwest of Baghdad, searching for biological and chemical weapons.

The arms experts on Sunday already visited a pesticides factory within the complex, near the town of Fallujah.

The Tareq site, affiliated with Iraq's Military Industrialization Commission, has been a research and production base for chemical and biological weapons.

Another team of arms experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) paid a third visit to the al-Tuwaitha nuclear facility, some 25 km southeast of Baghdad.

The IAEA experts had searched the complex run by Iraq's nuclear power authority on Wednesday and Saturday.

A nuclear reactor at the facility was bombed by Israel in 1981 and many other installations were destroyed by US-led coalition forces in the 1991 Gulf War.

A new group of 25 UN weapons inspectors arrived here Sunday to reinforce the current 17-strong inspection team searching for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

The new-comers reportedly participated in Monday's field missions.

By Jan. 27, the inspectors must give their first report to the UN Security Council.

Iraq has been under sweeping UN sanctions since its August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the embargo will not be lifted until the UN verifies that Iraq has eliminated all of its weapons of mass destruction and means of launch them.

Continuous spats about alleged espionage activities between Iraqand the UN arms inspectors, who were commissioned to verify that Iraq has been disarmed, led to crisis in 1997 and 1998, and eventually the air war against Baghdad from Dec. 17-19, 1998.

The inspectors were since barred from entering Iraq until Nov. 25, when the first batch of UN experts were flown in from Cyprus under UN Resolution 1441.

The United States has accused Iraq of seeking to develop weaponsof mass destruction and threatened to launch military strike against Iraq if it fails to cooperate with the UN arms inspection.

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