UN Arms Experts Continue Operations in Iraq on Islamic Holy Day

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, December 14, 2002

UN Arms Experts Continue Operations in Iraq on Islamic Holy Day

UN weapons inspectors slowed down their searches for banned weapons in Iraq on Friday, the Islamic holy day of the week, and carried out only two missions near Baghdad.

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UN weapons inspectors slowed down their searches for banned weapons in Iraq on Friday, the Islamic holy day of the week, and carried out only two missions near Baghdad.

It's the first time for the UN experts to carry out field missions on Friday since they resumed their new round of inspections on Nov. 27 after a four-year suspension.

But the UN inspectors have significantly scaled down their field operations on the Islamic day of rest. They visited around six to thirteen sites each day over the past three days.

A team of UN arms experts went to the Centre for Communicable Diseases in downtown Baghdad, presumedly looking for materials that can be used for biological weapons.

Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, Iraq's chief liaison officer with UN inspection mission, was summoned to the hospital around mid-day to solve what appeared to be the first significant incident since the inspections resumed on Nov. 27.

A hotline between the UN experts and Iraq's monitoring officials was also used for the first time.

The inspections incident happened at a centre for communicable diseases which had never previously been visited by UN weapons experts.

Some three hours after the inspectors drew up at 9 a.m. (0600 GMT), Amin, also chief of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, arrived to announce he had been summoned to deal with "a little problem."

"The hotline was used. We came straight away. There is no problem," he told reporters happily as he went out of the disease control center after the incident.

A UN official also sought to play down the first hitch in the inspections process, saying "this a newly declared site, and we wanted to clarify the tagging procedure. That's all."

Meanwhile, another team of inspectors paid their unannounced visit to the Ibn Al-Haitham facility in Kadhimiya, some 15 km northwest of Baghdad, according to Iraqi officials and correspondents at the Press Center of the Information Ministry.

The facility, affiliated with Iraq's Military Industrialization Commission, was reportedly engaged in developing Iraq's short-rangeal-Sumoud missiles.

There are currently 98 UN inspectors in Iraq, 71 of whom are from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and 27 from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

By Jan. 27, the inspectors must give their first report to the UN Security Council about Iraq's weapons programs.

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