UN nuclear inspectors due in Iraq
A team of seven United Nations weapons inspectors is due to arrive in Baghdad.
The team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be visiting Iraq to conduct limited investigations into reports of looting at the main Iraqi nuclear facility.
However, the United States has denied the IAEA inspectors the opportunity to measure environmental contamination or look into reports of radiation sickness and has banned them from entering the main complex at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Centre or six other nuclear sites.
They will spend around two weeks in Iraq and are expected in Baghdad today, having already flown into Kuwait.
The inspectors are confined to assessing how much nuclear material was taken from the storage site near Tuwaitha in the chaos following the end of the war on Iraq.
The US has been against the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq since the war started. UN Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and his team fled Iraq days before the US-led invasion on March 20th.
The IAEA inspectors were permitted to return after the organisation’s chief Mohamed ElBaradei warned that a humanitarian and environmental crisis was brewing at Tuwaitha, after looters sold barrels, once filled with processed uranium, to local residents for food storage.
Dr Blix told the UN Council yesterday that he believed the coalition had ‘jumped to conclusions’ over Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destructions.
He also revealed that some of the evidence provided to his weapons inspection team by the US and Britain had failed to lead them to any banned weapons.
