LIBYA: UN inspectors gave Libya high marks yesterday for working with them as they began checking if it had really renounced its ambitions to build an atomic bomb.
"Libya has shown a good deal of co-operation, a good deal of openness," said Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
He headed a team of inspectors invited to the north African country to see how far it had got in developing a bomb and to make sure it goes no further.
Following months of secret talks with US and British officials, Libya said this month it was giving up efforts to obtain nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
An IAEA spokesman said the Libyan leader, Col Muammar Gadafy, had reiterated his commitment to abandoning weapons of mass destruction programmes during a half-hour meeting with Dr ElBaradei yesterday.
Dr ElBaradei said Libya had agreed to sign the additional protocol to the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing more intrusive snap inspections.
"Libya committed today to act as if the protocol was in force," he told reporters before leaving Tripoli for Vienna where the IAEA is based. Other inspectors will stay on. In a first full day of inspections on Sunday, inspectors visited four nuclear sites near Tripoli that the UN body had not seen before.
Libya, long on the US list of sponsors of terrorism and treated as a pariah by the West, displayed dismantled and boxed uranium enrichment centrifuges - machines which can purify the radioactive material for use in weapons or as nuclear fuel.
"What we have seen is a programme at a very initial stage," Dr ElBaradei said of the enrichment programme. "I am happy we came in at that stage."
IAEA officials hope the investigation into Libya's enrichment programme may provide clues to who helped Iran get its enrichment technology. Both countries say they got centrifuges on the black market.
Getting hold of weapons-grade material is considered the main obstacle for any country trying to build an atomic weapon.
Dr ElBaradei said UN inspectors had already interviewed several Libyan scientists and would visit more facilities during the next few days.
An IAEA official said the team had also asked Libyan officials for key documents.