U.N. inspectors speed up the pace

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Reinforced with newly arrived staff, U.N. inspectors stepped up their searches Saturday, visiting a dozen sites in Iraq -- including rooms at an infectious disease center where they were denied access a day earlier.

"Today was probably the single largest" group of sites inspected since the teams returned to Iraq after a four-year hiatus, said Hiro Ueki, a spokesman for the U.N. program. He said inspectors had visited a total of 70 sites.

After their first known snag, inspectors revisited the Communicable Disease Control Center in Baghdad on Saturday, entering rooms that had been locked on Friday.

Inspectors said in a statement that there was no sign of tampering with seals they applied to doors and windows at the center when they were denied access. They said Saturday's inspection lasted about an hour.

With the arrival of 15 additional inspectors Saturday, the total now stands at 113.

Iraq received chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix's demand Saturday for a list of all personnel currently and formerly associated with the country's chemical, biological and ballistic missile programs, a U.N. official said.

The U.N. Security Council resolution that ordered the resumed inspections authorizes teams to interview any Iraqi inside the country and without Iraqi officials present, or to take the person out of Iraq with his or her family.

One site visited Saturday was the main Iraqi nuclear center where nearly two tons of low-grade enriched uranium are stored. Inspection teams also went to a Scud missile facility that had been used to make bomb casings for chemical weapons before the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

U.S. jets, meanwhile, used "precision guided weapons" against three air-defense installations Saturday morning south and east of Baghdad after Iraqi military jets violated the southern no-fly zone, the U.S. Central Command said.

The Iraqi warplanes "went south. I cannot begin to ascertain what their motivation was in doing so other than plainly violating the zone," Central Command spokesman Maj. Pete Mitchell told The Associated Press in Washington.

U.S. and coalition aircraft have patrolled the southern and northern no-fly zones since the Gulf War ended.

The zones were established to prevent Saddam Hussein from attacking the Kurdish minority in the north of the country and the Shiites in the south.

The inspection of the Scud complex, the government-owned al-Nasr company, 30 miles north of Baghdad, was a re-examination of the facility that also houses sophisticated machine tools that can, for example, help manufacture gas centrifuges. Such centrifuges are used to "enrich" uranium to bomb-grade level -- a method favored by the Iraqis in their bomb program of the late 1980s.

The al-Tuwaitha nuclear facility 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, contains 1.8 tons of low-grade enriched uranium and several tons of natural and depleted uranium.

U.N. nuclear agency inspectors who visited the site Saturday have said the materials are of such low radioactivity that they could not easily be turned into weapons. The uranium has been in storage since the end of the Gulf War.

Iraqi officials said the nuclear facility had been destroyed twice -- by the Israelis in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq war and by the U.S.-led coalition that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait during the Gulf War.

Recent satellite photos show four new buildings at the site suspected of housing new nuclear projects. The Iraqis, who deny have weapons of mass destruction or programs to build them, say the buildings are for environmental, medical and agricultural research.

In the first round of inspections in the 1990s, after Iraq's Guld War defeat, the United Nations destroyed tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

Recently published British and U.S. intelligence reports said new construction at old weapons sites and other activities suggest the Iraqis may have resumed making weapons of mass destruction.