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UN weapons inspectors bound for Iraq
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-07-21 02:49

Iraq's new government has asked U.N. inspectors to return to the country, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Tuesday.

"The return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq is an urgent necessity; not to search for weapons of mass destruction but to write the final report about the nonexistence of (such) weapons ... in Iraq, which will enable the lifting of sanctions," Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters in Cairo.

He said the invitation was issued by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

The inspectors will be sent in the next few days, ElBaradei said.

The inspectors, who will continue their work to ensure that Iraq adheres with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, will return as soon as safety arrangements have been made, agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said from the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

The inspectors would go to Tuwaitha nuclear complex, 12 miles south of Baghdad, U.N. officials said Wednesday. The will conduct "an inventory verification on the nuclear material remaining in Iraq," Fleming added.

Besides safeguards inspectors, the agency also had weapons inspectors in Iraq who searched for nuclear weapons under a mandate from the U.N. Security Council. Those inspectors left just before the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

The U.N. Security Council is to decide when the weapons inspectors can return. The agency repeatedly has said it wants to send them back to finish their job.

In Washington, State Department spokesman said the inspection in Iraq is unrelated to the one which occurred during the months preceding the Iraq war.

He said the new inspection is part of a regular IAEA program that involves all countries which have had safeguard agreements with the agency.

"One shouldn't confuse these inspections with the UNMOVIC, the prewar special regime that applied to Iraq," Boucher said.

He added that there has been some media misinterpretation of ElBaradei's announcement.

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