Weapons inspectors pore over Iraq declaration

Weapons inspectors in New York and Vienna began combing through Iraq’s massive dossier detailing its chemical, biological and nuclear programmes today, to determine whether Baghdad is complying with United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Copies of the 12,000-page declaration, which left Baghdad on Saturday, arrived in battered, black suitcases and were met at UN headquarters in New York at 1.40am today, British time, by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, who said his staff ”will immediately take a look” at the material.

Blix said he wanted “an overview of how many pages are printed, how much did we get in CD-ROMs”.

The nuclear component of the declaration arrived yesterday in Vienna, Austria, where the International Atomic Energy Agency is based. The chemical, biological and missile components of the dossier will be analysed and translated by Blix’s UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA’s director-general, said analysts in Vienna began work immediately on the declaration, “including the painstaking and systematic cross-checking” of the information it contains. Iraq’s account will be compared with intelligence provided by other nations and with data from past and present inspections, he said.

The IAEA hopes to provide the security council with a preliminary analysis within 10 days and a more detailed analysis when it reports back to the council at the end of January.

Blix said he would meet the security council tomorrow to update it on how long it would take his team to sift through its sections of the documents, translate the Arabic portions and even remove so-called sensitive material that could get into the wrong hands.

Iraq insists it has no programmes for developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. It turned over the declaration to UN officials in Baghdad on Saturday – a day before the United Nations’ deadline.

The complete declaration, in Arabic and English with an 80-page summary, was contained in at least a dozen bound volumes accompanied by computer disks. It covers such subjects as the 1990s UN weapons inspection regime in Iraq, when many arms and much production equipment were destroyed, and “dual-use” industries that can serve both civilian and military purposes.

The United States has threatened war against Iraq if Baghdad does not meet its obligations to disarm and co-operate with inspections. Bush administration officials say they have “solid evidence” that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction, and will eventually supply it to UN inspectors.

In Baghdad yesterday, Saddam Hussein’s science adviser, Lt Gen Amer al-Saadi, called the declaration “accurate, comprehensive and truthful” and challenged those who contended otherwise to come forward with proof.

Inspectors say continued inspections are the only way to ascertain whether the claims in the Iraqi report are truthful.

The previous UN weapons inspection regime collapsed in December 1998 amid UN-Iraqi disputes over access to sites and Iraqi allegations that some inspectors were spies.

If Iraq is found to have co-operated fully with the inspectors, UN resolutions call for the security council to consider suspending economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.

By the end of the 1991 Gulf War, inspectors discovered the oil-rich nation had imported thousands of pounds of uranium, some of which already was refined for weapons use, and had considered two types of nuclear delivery systems.

Inspectors seized the uranium, destroyed facilities and chemicals, dismantled more than 40 missiles and confiscated thousands of documents.