Arms investigators find empty chemical warhead

UN arms inspectors found another empty chemical warhead on one of a dozen surprise inspections as they pressed ahead on a mission in which Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, in a rare interview, said he hopes they “reach the truth”.

“The question is whether the other side wants to reach the truth or whether it wants to find a pretext for aggression,” the Iraqi leader said in an interview with former MP Tony Benn. The interview was broadcast yesterday.

The chemical warhead that the UN inspectors reported finding at the al-Taji ammunition depot, north of Baghdad, apparently was the 17th turned up since January 16, when inspectors searching for banned arms found 12 of the 122mm rocket warheads at a storage area south of the capital.

The Iraqis said those empty munitions were overlooked left-overs from the 1980s. Three days later, they said their own search uncovered four more, at al-Taji. It was not immediately clear whether the single one found yesterday, which a UN statement said was then tagged and secured, was connected with those four.

In the TV interview, conducted on Sunday in Baghdad and released on Monday, Saddam repeated Iraq’s steadfast denial that it possesses weapons of mass destruction.

“These weapons do not come in small pills that you can hide in your pocket. These are weapons of mass destruction, and it is easy to work out if Iraq has them or not,” he said. Iraq wants the UN inspectors to succeed, he said. ”It is in our interests to help them (inspectors) reach the truth.”

As the global debate intensified over the future of arms inspections in Iraq, and the future of peace in the Middle East, the UN inspectors continued their daily unannounced rounds in their hunt for signs of prohibited chemical, biological or nuclear weapons development.

The sites inspected yesterday included the often-visited al-Rafah missile engine test installation south west of Baghdad, and the large Qa Qa chemicals complex, also to the south, the Information Ministry reported.

A statement issued nightly by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry on the day’s inspections did not report, as the UN statement did, that another empty chemical warhead had been found at the al-Taji depot. It said only that the UN inspectors had inquired about the four warheads reported found previously there by Iraqi authorities.

After some 500 inspections over more than two months, the arms controllers have yet to report finding any major violation of the UN ban on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

US President George W Bush has repeatedly signalled impatience with the UN inspection process, which could take months, and the Pentagon is steadily building up tens of thousands of US troops in the region.

And on the Iraqi side, thousands of Iraqi militia and army recruits marched yesterday through the streets of Mosul in a display of military readiness.