Powell: Iraq is moving weapons to stop detection

US Secretary of State Colin Powell is continuing his submission to the United Nations Security Council that Washington has evidence that Iraq is trying to make weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Powell said a search of an Iraqi scientists house had uncovered 2,000 pages of documents, some relating to Iraq's plans for a nuclear programme.

But the inspectors could not search the house of every scientist and official, he told the council.

Actual weapons are being moved around the country so that inspectors cannot find them, Mr Powell said.

“Iraq is moving not documents and hard drives but weapons of mass destruction to stop them being found by inspectors,” he said.

Mr Powell said that all relevant intelligence was being provided to Dr Blix's Unmovic team and Dr El Baradei's inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

He said: “The material comes from a variety of sources, some US sources and some from other countries.

“Some are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations and photos taken by satellites.

“Others are people who have risked their lives to tell the world what Saddam Hussein is really up to.

“I can’t tell you everything we know, but what I can share with you, combined with what all of us have learnt over the years, is deeply worrying.”

Mr Powell played a phone conversation between members of Saddam's elite Republican Guard secretly taped on November 26, the day before inspections resumed.

A colonel and a brigadier general can apparently be heard discussing the return of the UN teams and a vehicle modified by the “al-Kindi company”.

The colonel asked: “What do we say if one of them sees it?”

The brigadier general also said: “I’m worried you have something left.”

And the colonel said: “We evacuated everything. We don’t have anything left.”

Mr Powell told the council that al-Kindi was a “company well known to have been involved in prohibited weapons activity”.

A second taped conversation involving the Republican Guard HQ discussed the “possibility there is by chance forbidden ammunition”.

The recipient was also told to “destroy the message” by his colleague at the HQ, who said: “I don’t want anyone to see this message.”

Mr Powell said the conversations showed the Iraqi regime was deliberately attempting to deceive the inspectors.

Instead of responding to the demand for a weapons declaration it decided to “overwhelm inspectors with information about Iraq’s permitted weapons”, he said.