Spy plane flies over Iraq

An American U-2 surveillance plane has made its first flight over Iraq in support of the current UN inspection mission, marking another concession by President Saddam Hussein’s regime to stave off a US-led attack.

The U-2 flight yesterday took place only one week after the UN and Baghdad broke an impasse that had kept the reconnaissance plane grounded since the start of inspections in November.

The Iraqis agreed to allow U-2 flights last week, fulfilling a major demand by UN inspectors seeking to determine if Iraq still harbours weapons of mass destruction.

“At 11.55am, a U-2 surveillance plane entered Iraqi airspace and reconnoitred several areas of Iraq and left Iraqi airspace at 4.15pm,” the Iraqi Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “The reconnaissance operation lasted 4 hours and 20 minutes.”

The statement did not indicate the plane’s flight path.

“A U-2 did fly today,” said Ewen Buchanan, the New York-based spokesman for the chief inspector Hans Blix. “It’s about time, too. We’ve been trying to do this for quite a while and we hope that the other reconnaissance aircraft and drones will be up and running shortly, thereby increasing our capabilities.”

Iraqi officials had objected to the U-2 flights, contending they could not guarantee the safety of the plane if it was flying over Iraq at the same time as US-British air patrols in the “no-fly zones” of northern and southern Iraq. Unless those warplanes were kept out of the sky during the U-2 flight, the reconnaissance craft might be targeted by anti-aircraft fire, they said.

The no-fly zones were declared by Washington, without UN authorisation, to protect dissident Shiite Muslims and Kurds from Iraqi forces. The Iraqis consider the zones to be illegal.

It was not immediately clear whether the UN met conditions requested by the Iraqis in order to let the U-2 flights pass unimpeded.

General Hossam Mohamed Amin, the chief Iraqi liaison officer to the UN inspectors, had asked Mr Blix to give Baghdad data on the flight before it entered the country’s airspace, including the plane’s call sign, its altitude, speed and time of arrival.

Yesterday, inspectors visited six missile sites – including one involved in a rocket system the UN has banned.

Mr Blix told the UN Security Council on Friday that UN missiles experts “concluded unanimously” that two versions of Iraq’s Al Samoud-2 missile could exceed the 94-mile range limit set by the UN – and were therefore banned.