US cranks up heat on hunt for weaponry

BAGHDAD - As a United Nations deadline approaches for Iraq to come clean on whether it has weapons of mass destruction, the United States President warned Iraq's leader against trying to deceive UN arms inspectors and said he was not encouraged by Baghdad's attitude.

"Any act of delay, deception or defiance will prove that [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein has not adopted the path of compliance and has rejected the path of peace," George W. Bush told military leaders at the Pentagon.

"So far the steps are not encouraging," he said.

UN arms inspectors swooped on an Iraqi presidential palace in Baghdad last night, searching for weapons of mass destruction, witnesses said.

A team of inspectors entered the palace, one of several in the country belonging to Saddam, in the Karkh district in central Baghdad.

Bush noted that Iraq recently had fired on US and British planes enforcing the "no-fly" zones in the country and Baghdad had sent letters to the UN that he described as "filled with protests and falsehoods".

In the latest encounter, US and British warplanes attacked targets in the northern "no-fly" zone yesterday in the second raid in two days against Iraqi air defences.

In his most detailed comments on Iraq since the weapons inspections began last week, Bush made clear Baghdad must supply a "credible and complete list of its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by Sunday" - the December 8 deadline set by the UN Security Council.

"That declaration must be credible and complete, or the Iraqi dictator will have demonstrated to the world once again that he has chosen not to change his behaviour," Bush said.

At the US mission to the UN in New York, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, conferred with chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix on what would happen after Iraq handed over its weapons declaration.

Rice and Blix discussed how to evaluate the declaration, which was expected to arrive at the UN at the last minute, diplomats said.

Bush has warned repeatedly that the US and its allies will disarm Iraq by force if it fails to give up the suspected weapons programmes.

Iraq has denied possessing the banned weapons and has accused the US of looking for a pretext for war.

In five days of inspections, UN arms experts so far have found no evidence of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons programmes.

But in a swoop on suspect sites yesterday, they said they had discovered some equipment and several UN monitoring cameras had gone missing from a missile factory.

The experts reported that equipment tagged by previous UN inspection teams was not found at the Karamah (Dignity) compound in Baghdad and that Iraqi officials said it had either been destroyed in Western bombing or moved elsewhere.

A UN source declined to comment on how serious the matter was, but said Iraq had told the inspectors where the remaining equipment had been put.

Karamah, run by Iraq's Military Industrialisation Commission in the Wazireyah industrial district of Baghdad, was one of Iraq's main missile development sites before it was placed on long-term monitoring by previous inspection teams.

UN inspectors, who spent just over six hours at the facility yesterday, said it was now an engineering design and research and development site.

Apparently looking beyond the rule of Saddam, whose regime he has vowed to topple, Bush yesterday named Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington's special Afghan envoy, to become a special envoy for "free Iraqis". He will also carry on in his existing job.

- REUTERS

Herald feature: Iraq