UN official - Iraq not breaching resolution

The UN’s nuclear chief will tell the Security Council that Iraq is not in material breach of the latest resolution, but that further inspections are needed to verify Saddam Hussein’s claims that he has no weapons of mass destruction, officials said today.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency leading the hunt for nuclear weaponry in Iraq, will make a case for more inspections when he briefs the council at UN headquarters in New York tomorrow.

"There’s nothing new in what we’ve seen. It’s largely what we’ve seen before," an IAEA official said.

ElBaradei will carry that message to the Security Council, and will resist pressure to declare that Iraq has violated Resolution 1441, which required it to make a full and complete disclosure of its weapons programmes, the official said.

Asked whether ElBaradei would advise the council to find Iraq in material breach, the official said: “No, not at all. Iraq has given us a lot of information. He will say the key outstanding issue is that they claim to have only peaceful uses for what they’ve got – but that we need to verify that.”

Although Iraq steadfastly denies that it has weapons of mass destruction, the United States contends it does, and asserts that its 12,000-page declaration mocks international efforts to get to the bottom of the threat by rehashing old information.

But ElBaradei will stick to his contention that only a comprehensive inspection regime – even if it takes a year as the IAEA has said – will show whether Saddam is telling the truth.

“The Iraqis claim they’ve done nothing illegal. We’ve just got to find out if that’s the case,” the IAEA official said.

IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said the agency would resist pressure from the Bush administration to rush to judgment on whether Iraq has an active nuclear programme. The agency has been analysing 2,400 pages from the declaration that deal with nuclear issues.

“If we said after a month, ‘Yup, they’re clear of nuclear weapons,’ no one in his right mind would believe us,” Gwozdecky said. “We understand the political pressure to move quickly, but we will not compromise the technical quality of our inspections.”

Gwozdecky said ElBaradei was committed to taking time to let science determine the nature of Iraq’s weapons programmes.

“Isn’t it worth a year to get a peaceful solution to this problem?” he asked.

“It’s like a criminal murder trial. The defence has said, ‘My client is innocent. I intend to prove it.’ Then you spend weeks and months proving it. It takes time to do so. Would you expect any jury to convict based on just one month of investigation?”

The Bush administration has said it has “solid evidence” that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Gwozdecky called anew for Washington to hand over that evidence, noting that the latest UN resolution urges member states to share crucial information with the United Nations.

“We are the only bodies legally mandated to go in and verify what’s going on,” he said.