'No weapons inspectors' - Iraqi minister

UN weapons inspections in Iraq are over, the country’s information minister told the Arabic satellite TV network Al-Jazeera today.

It was the clearest rejection yet of American and UN demands to allow the inspectors to resume their work after four years.

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said the US government was “confused” and was making inspections into an issue in an attempt to use it in the latest crisis between Washington and Baghdad.

“This is a lie,” he said of Washington’s insistence that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction. “Inspections have finished in Iraq.”

Under UN Security Council resolutions, sanctions imposed after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to the Gulf war, cannot be lifted until UN inspectors certify Iraq’s biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons have been destroyed along with the long-range missiles to deliver them.

The return of inspectors is a key demand of the council, and especially of the United States, which has accused Iraq of trying to rebuild its weapons programmes and of supporting terrorism.

US President George Bush, who has called for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s removal, has threatened unspecified consequences if inspectors are not allowed to return and US officials are talking openly about a new war with Iraq.