IRAQ: UN arms experts inspected two sites during their fifth day in Iraq yesterday with the full co-operation of Iraqi authorities anxious to avoid any row that might hasten war.
A sceptical President Bush plans to turn up the pressure on President Saddam Hussein to meet a UN deadline for declaring any weapons of mass destruction.
"The President wants to make certain that Saddam Hussein has no weapons and is not in violation of the United Nations. The President is sceptical that Saddam Hussein will comply," the White House spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, said. It was too early to say if Iraq was co-operating with resumed UN weapons inspections. "One week is not adequate time," he said.
Inspectors visited a military industrial complex in Baghdad and distilleries to the north-east and both inspections seemed to go without a hitch.
Stressing that their mission is still in its early days, the inspectors say they have found no evidence yet of banned weapons programmes and have encountered no obstruction by Iraqi authorities.
In one of the longest inspections of a single site to date, a team of inspectors spent just over six hours at Karamah compound run by Iraq's Military Industrialisation Commission in the Wazireyah industrial district of the capital.
Brig Mohammad Saleh Mohammad, commander of the compound, told reporters the facility was involved in the production - mainly the design - of missiles permitted by UN Security Council resolutions. Iraq is allowed only to have missiles with a range of 150 km or less.
The officer said the inspectors were given complete access to the site. "They saw almost all documents, inspected all buildings on the site and interviewed some of the employees. There was no problem and the whole inspection process went on smoothly," he said.
Brig Issam Dawood said the site was heavily bombed during an assault by British and US warplanes in 1998 for Iraq's alleged failure to co-operate with the inspectors.
Another inspection team spent about 90 minutes at private distilleries which produce alcoholic drinks near Khan Abi Sa'ad, 30 km north-east of Baghdad. It was not immediately clear why the experts went there. They barred any movement to or from Karamah.
Meanwhile, Iraq has complained to the United Nations over a Western air raid on its southern port city of Basra and urged the world body to end US and British air patrols over the country. The Foreign Minister, Mr Naji Sabri, in a letter to UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, said Sunday's raid was part of a "barbaric terrorist aggression" against Iraq.
Officials said the bombing killed four people at oil company offices. The US military insisted its planes had launched "precision-guided" weapons at Iraqi air defences and that it always took pains to avoid hitting civilians.
Russia was also critical of the raid. A foreign ministry statement said: "Using force without the agreement of the UN Security Council can only complicate the mission of international inspectors in Iraq."
Meanwhile, US warplanes on yesterday dropped 240,000 leaflets on damaged air defence communications sites in southern Iraq, warning the Iraqi military not to repair targets which were bombed on Sunday, the US military said.
The United States says that continued firing by Iraqi defences at US and British jets patrolling the no-fly zones is a direct violation of the most recent UN resolution which paved the way for the latest round of inspections to resume.