Inspectors will fly to Baghdad on Monday

11.45am - by DAVID USBORNE

NEW YORK - An advance party of about 25 international inspectors will fly to Baghdad on Monday to begin preparing for an urgent resumption of their mission to hunt down weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and to challenge Baghdad's claim - reiterated yesterday - that it is "clean" and has no such arsenal.

The team, headed by Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, and by Mohammed al Baradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will first leave for a staging base in Cyprus tomorrow before flying on to Baghdad after the weekend.

Iraq last night said it was unconditionally accepting a UN resolution passed last Friday giving it a final chance to disarm and giving Mr Blix 45 days to resume inspections. By that date, Mr Blix will have about 100 inspectors on the ground.

The task for the advance team will be to reopen and re-equip offices for the inspectors in Baghdad that were abandoned four years ago when the last UN inspectors pulled out.

There was some cheer at UN headquarters that Iraq had bowed to the resolution two days before a 7-day deadline and done so without setting conditions. But there was grave alarm that the Iraqi ambassador in New York, Mohammed Al-Douri, simultaneously insisted that Iraq retained no banned weapons.

Under the terms of the resolution, Iraq must submit within 30 days, by December 8, a declaration laying out for inspectors the true extent of its weapons programmes.

It is highly unlikely that Washington or London will accept any contention by Iraq that it is indeed clean of such programmes.

Both the British and American governments insist they have ample evidence to the contrary. A long report issued by Britain two months ago argues, by contrast, that Iraq has been striving to rebuild its arsenal of biological and chemical weapons and is also working to develop nuclear warheads.

The stage may be set, officials warned, for a crisis on December 8, therefore, even before the inspections proper have got under way. That seems to be inevitable, if indeed Iraq continues in its position that it has none of the weapons that London and Washington believes are in its possession.

What would follow in the event of a flat-out denial by Iraq was expected to dominate discussions between President George Bush and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at the White House last night.

The UN remains anxious lest Mr Bush abandons the multinational arena and decides to act unilaterally at the first sign of non-cooperation by Iraq. An empty declaration on 8 December could be the trigger.

"The next red flag will be the declaration that Iraq is required to make," agreed Terry Taylor, a former weapons inspector. If the declaration is a nil declaration, I am not certain that Washington will accept that as credible".

The crucial question at the UN is this: who will be the judge of the validity of Iraq's declaration on 8 December and, further along the line, of the sincerity of Iraq's subsequent cooperation with inspectors? Will it be Mr Blix, as countries like Russia and France desire, or will it be Mr Bush and Tony Blair?

Mr Blix, meanwhile, has indicated that he will begin inspections before the 45-day deadline if he possibly can. But there is much to do beforehand. While the inspectors will regain their old headquarters in the Canal Hotel building on the outskirts of Baghdad, they must fill it with new computers. Jeeps still parked outside must be fired up and helicopters have to be flown in.

There is also a large volume of state-of-the-art detection technology acquired by the UN over recent months - which, officials hope, should make inspections far more penetrative than in the past - that must be delivered to Iraq. These include monitors designed to uncover suspicious substances, sophisticated laser sensors, cameras and telecommunication kits.

- INDEPENDENT

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