The Iraqi government indicated today it would issue its declaration of any weapons programmes it still had next Saturday - a day before the deadline set by the United Nations.
The document "will include new elements," said chief Iraqi liaison officer General Hossam Mohammed Amin, "but those new elements do not mean Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction."
The White House reacted by saying it would study the document carefully dampening speculation it would act immediately after its publication.
"This (declaration) needs to be gone over completely and thoroughly," White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer told reporters. "We don't know how many pages they'll provide. It could be hundreds, it could be thousands of pages. We just don't know. But depending on how long it is we'll take the appropriate time to review it, assess it, study it," he said. The UN secretary general Mr Kofi Annan said earlier this evening that Iraqi co-operation with weapons inspectors had been good so far.
"Obviously the co-operation seems to be good," he said. "There is a good indication that the Iraqis are cooperating but this is only the beginning."
"They have to sustain the cooperation and effort and perform and we will have to wait for the report of the inspectors," Mr Annan said.
A UN team said today it was able to inspect "every corner" of the al-Sejud palace compound during a groundbreaking inspection of the sensitive site today.
"We were able to inspect every corner of the presidential palace, every room, every corner," Mr Hiro Ueki said after the two-hour inspection of the compound, the first under the tough new disarmament regime adopted last month.
Asked how many rooms had been checked, Mr Ueki said "quite a few", but he declined to elaborate on what the inspectors had been looking for or what equipment they had used.
The spokesman said the vast compound, which contains two separate palaces - the al-Sijda and al-Sejud - overlooking the Tigris river, had been frozen throughout the two-hour inspection.
Despite this, Britain and the US continue pressure on the Iraqi regime. British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair said he remained convinced that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"It has been made clear throughout that the purpose is to make sure that any weapons of mass destruction Iraq has they are disarmed of. If they find no weapons that is another matter," he said.
"But I think it is quite clear according to our information that those weapons exist."
He added: "If Saddam refuses to co-operate in any way at all then he must be disarmed by force."
US President George W. Bush said yesterday he was not encouraged by Iraq's reaction so far to UN disarmament demands and challenged Baghdad to provide a "credible and complete" list of its weapons by the Sunday deadline.
"Any act of delay, deception or defiance will prove that Saddam Hussein has not adopted the path of compliance, and has rejected the path of peace," Mr Bush said in a speech to military leaders at the Pentagon.
Agencies
- Iraq fired surface-to-air missiles at US and British warplanes that staged 45 "armed sorties" over southern Iraq today, driving them back to their bases in Kuwait, a military spokesman said.
"Iraqi missile batteries and ground defenses confronted enemy warplanes" that flew over some 30 locations in southern Iraq, "forcing them to flee to their bases in Kuwait," the spokesman said, quoted by the official INA news agency.
The US military said yesterday coalition warplanes enforcing "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq had bombed Iraqi air defense sites in the north in response to Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery. AFP