Nuclear report 'backs Iraq claims'

IRAQ'S nuclear arms dossier appears to echo Saddam Hussein's claims that his country poses no atomic threat, but only an exhaustive analysis and new inspections can judge whether the declaration is truthful, the UN nuclear agency said yesterday.

"At first glance, it appears the declaration is consistent with Iraq's statement that it has no nuclear weapons and that it has no nuclear weapons material or associated programs," said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The Vienna-based IAEA will rely on fresh inspections in Iraq and a thorough check of Iraq's claims against the agency's vast database to determine whether Saddam is hiding anything, she said.

"The cross-checking is extremely important, including cross-checking on the ground," she said. "Should there be elements we feel have to be checked out, we have the advantage of having a team on the ground that can go the next day."

Armed with a powerful electronic database, experts at the UN nuclear agency began combing through a 2,400-page dossier on Iraq's nuclear programme within hours of its handover to the IAEA on Sunday.

Their task: to see how Saddam's insistence that his country is free of nuclear weaponry measures up against the hundreds of thousands of documents the agency has compiled in a computerised database since it began inspections in Iraq in the early 1990s.

The analysis will include "the painstaking and systematic cross-checking of the information provided by Iraq against information which the IAEA already has", as well as against information from member states and data collected in Iraq by past and present inspection teams, the agency said in a statement.

"They have told us in the report... that they have no activities that have any relevance to nuclear weapons in the last four years," IAEA Director-General Mohamed El Baradei said.

"Clearly that's a statement we need to verify," Mr El Baradei said. "As you know, there was a report they were procuring certain equipment, certain materials that could have been used in the manufacturing (of) centrifuges for enriching uranium."

Mr El Baradei said his agency, which is leading the hunt for nuclear arms in Iraq, hopes to provide the UN Security Council with a preliminary report within 10 days, and a more detailed analysis when it reports back to the council at the end of January.

The work will be cumbersome: About 300 of the dossier's pages are in Arabic and must be translated before they can be assessed.