A UN plane left Baghdad today with a mammoth dossier which Iraq says proves it has no doomsday weapons, despite deep US scepticism backed by a threat of war.
The plane flew with some 12,000 documents to Cyprus, a base for the UN arms inspectors, where the pages were split into two batches.
Some left with inspectors on a plane to Frankfurt on their way to the United Nations in New York. Other documents would be flown to Austria, home of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The United Nations had set today as a deadline for Iraq to declare any nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
The inspectors began hunting in Iraq last month for any such weapons for the first time since 1998. US President Mr George Bush, who has made clear Iraq faces war if Washington judges Baghdad has deceived the world, promised that the Iraqi declaration would be studied carefully.
"We will judge the declaration's honesty and completeness only after we have thoroughly examined it, and that will take some time," he said.
"The declaration must be credible and accurate and complete," he added. But a senior US official said Washington had evidence Iraq had retained and even accelerated banned weapons programmes.
"I think we have substantial evidence," he said. "Since 1998 there has been a number of pieces of information, intelligence evidence, that suggest that a number of these programmes not only continue but have accelerated....There are things of course that we're not going to make public," the official said.
The official suggested that the United States may provide additional intelligence and other support to UN inspectors in Iraq, who have said it was needed to do their job.