Weapons inspector: Papers show nuclear fuel bid

The head of the U.N. nuclear control agency said today that documents found at the home of an Iraqi scientist appeared to outline high-tech attempts to enrich uranium in the 1980s.

The scientist later confirmed that was the documents’ content, but said he did not work for that enrichment programme and had the papers only for the interest of his students.

Senior experts in the U.N. agency had said the enrichment method – which could be used to make nuclear weapons – proved too sophisticated for the Iraqis to exploit at the time.

U.N. nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who oversees the U.N. review of Iraq’s nuclear programme, told Associated Press that the research outlined in the documents had ”something to do with laser enrichment.”

U.N. officials have said Iraq’s attempt at “laser isotope separation,” begun in the 1970s, was a failure and was largely abandoned by 1987, in favour of more promising approaches to enriching uranium for nuclear bombs.

But ElBaradei said the issue appeared more whether the Iraqis had included the information found in the documents in the 12,000-page declaration they submitted to the United Nations last month.

Iraq denies it has any more banned weapons. The United States and Britain insist it does and threaten to disarm Iraq by force unless it gives up those weapons and cooperates fully with the U.N. inspectors.

“If it’s something we did not know about, it obviously doesn’t show the transparency we’ve been preaching,” ElBaradei said, alluding to U.N demands that Baghdad be more forthcoming with U.N. inspectors

The Iraqis claim the declaration submitted last month proves that their country no longer owns or is developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Top U.N. inspectors say the documentation was incomplete and failed to support Baghdad’s claims to have destroyed the banned weapons.

The documents were found Thursday by U.N. inspectors in the home of – once associated with his government’s nuclear program – as they paid their first unannounced calls on private homes in Iraq.

At a late-night news conference Saturday in Baghdad,, 55-year-old physicist Faleh Hassan, said Iraq cancelled its laser enrichment research programme in 1988 and he never worked on that project.

“I worked for the Nuclear Energy Agency, which was separate from the (enrichment) program,” he said.

Hassan urged ElBaradei to personally read the documents taken from his house, adding that they contained nothing new.

“Is it logical that I hide (documents pertaining to) a nuclear programme in my house?” he asked. “I am ready to go to ElBaradei to give him a clear picture of the documents found in my house.”

“The documents are about a previous experimental (programme) to use lasers to enrich uranium,” Hassan said. He added the Iraqis didn’t continue with the tests after 1988 because they needed “a developed scientific base in Iraq which we lacked.”

He said he kept the documents because he was a scientist and that they could be of benefit to his students.

Earlier today, Hassan said that when an accompanying Iraqi official left his side momentarily, a female U.N. inspector offered to arrange for him to leave Iraq as an ”escort” for his ailing wife to undergo treatment for kidney stones, diabetes and high blood pressure. He said the woman making the offer was an American, but that he could not remember her name.

Hassan said he refused the offer. “This is Mafia-like behaviour,” he told reporters.

Hassan, director of the Al-Razi military industrial site, said the documents were from his own private research work and the graduate theses of students he has advised. ElBaradei, in an interview with Cable News Network, said the documents were official and defended the inspectors’ conduct.

Under a U.N. resolution approved in November, inspectors are allowed to speak to Iraqi scientists in private and even take them outside the country for interviews – requirements Washington hopes will prompt them to reveal secrets.

Iraqi officials have said they do not believe it is necessary for scientists to be taken out of the country, but will allow it if a scientist consents.

Iraqi officials said Hassan is not on a list of 500 scientists and other specialists connected with nuclear, biological and chemical programmes submitted to the United Nations last month.

ElBaradei and Hans Blix, who heads the U.N. search for biological and chemical weapons, arrived to Larnaca on Saturday for an overnight stay before setting off for Baghdad.

They were going to the Iraqi capital on Sunday for two days of consultations with the inspectors and meetings with Iraqi officials before reporting January 27 to the Security Council on Iraq’s co-operation and the findings of the inspectors – a briefing that could help tip the scale toward war or peace.

Blix and ElBaredei said Saturday that Baghdad needed to do more to convince the world it was not hiding anything.

“Iraq has not cooperated sufficiently with the United Nations weapons inspectors, and we will impress the seriousness of the situation to them,” Blix told reporters as he arrived at his hotel in Larnaca on the southeast coast of Cyprus.

ElBaradei, speaking to the AP on his flight from Vienna to Larnaca, said he will tell Iraqi officials they need “to shift gear ... and come forward and declare everything to exonerate yourselves.”

He alluded to growing U.S. exasperation with Iraq – and the rising possibility of war as Baghdad continues to drag its feet on full compliance with the inspections regime.

“If we continue to say we cannot find a smoking gun but we cannot exclude the possibility because we haven’t seen all the evidence, this is not going to be sufficient,” he said. “Time is running out ... the international community is really getting impatient.”