Inspector- Documents point to failed nuclear fuel efforts

LARNACA, Cyprus -- An Iraqi scientist confirmed Saturday that documents found at his home outlined high-tech attempts to enrich uranium in the 1980s but said the information was from an experimental program that was declared a decade ago.

Senior experts in the U.N. agency have said the enrichment method -- which could be used to make nuclear weapons -- proved too sophisticated for the Iraqis to exploit at the time.

U.N. nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who oversees the U.N. review of Iraq's nuclear program, told The Associated Press the research outlined in the documents had "something to do with laser enrichment."

U.N. officials have said Iraq's attempt at "laser isotope separation," begun in the 1970s, was a failure and was largely abandoned by 1987 for more promising approaches to enriching uranium for nuclear bombs.

ElBaradei said the issue appeared to be more whether the Iraqis included the information found in the documents in the 12,000-page declaration they submitted to the United Nations last month.

The Iraqis claim the declaration proves that their country no longer owns or is developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Top U.N. inspectors say the documentation was incomplete and failed to support Baghdad's claims.

The documents were found Thursday by U.N. inspectors in the home of 55-year-old physicist Faleh Hassan as the inspectors paid their first unannounced calls on private homes in Iraq.

Hassan said Iraq canceled its laser enrichment research program in 1988 and he never worked on that project.

"I worked for the Nuclear Energy Agency, which was separate" from the enrichment program, he said at a news conference Saturday in Baghdad.

An offer to leave Iraq

He said he kept the documents because he was a scientist and they could benefit his students. The entire experiment with laser isotope enrichment was declared to the United Nations in 1991, he added.

Earlier Saturday, Hassan said that when an accompanying Iraqi official left his side momentarily, a female U.N. inspector offered to arrange for him to leave Iraq as an "escort" for his ailing wife to undergo treatment. He said the woman making the offer was an American.

Hassan said he refused the offer.

"This is Mafia-like behavior," he told reporters.

Hassan, director of the Al-Razi military industrial site, said the documents were from his own private research work and the graduate theses of students he has advised.

ElBaradei told CNN that the documents were official and he defended the inspectors' conduct.

Under a U.N. resolution approved in November, inspectors are allowed to speak to Iraqi scientists in private and even take them outside the country for interviews.

ElBaradei and Hans Blix, who heads the U.N. search for biological and chemical weapons, arrived in Larnaca on Saturday for an overnight stay.

They were going to the Iraqi capital today for two days of meetings with the inspectors and Iraqi officials before reporting Jan. 27 to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's cooperation and the findings of the inspectors -- a briefing that could help tip the scale toward war or peace.

Blix and ElBaradei said Saturday that Baghdad needed to do more to convince the world it was not hiding anything.

"Iraq has not cooperated sufficiently with the United Nations weapons inspectors, and we will impress the seriousness of the situation to them," Blix said.

ElBaradei, speaking to the AP on his flight from Vienna, Austria, to Larnaca on the southeast coast of Cyprus, said he will tell Iraqi officials they need "to shift gear ... and come forward and declare everything to exonerate yourselves."

He alluded to growing U.S. exasperation with Iraq -- and the rising possibility of war as Baghdad continues to drag its feet on full compliance with the inspections regime.

"Time is running out ... the international community is really getting impatient," he said.

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