The UN's nuclear watchdog agency is to send an inspection team to Iraq this week to investigate a site where nuclear material disappeared after looting, a spokesman said today.
"We'll send, probably Friday or Saturday, a mission of seven international experts to Iraq," Mr Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said.
He said the inspectors would be visiting the Al-Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, south of Baghdad, to "check how much low enriched uranium and 'yellowcake' (natural uranium) is still stocked or missing".
The mission is being carried out in co-operation with US authorities and should last "a maximum of two weeks," Mr Gwozdecky said.
He said "many tens of tons natural uranium and at least two tons of low enriched uranium" had disappeared from Al-Tuwaitha.
The Al-Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Centre, one of Iraq's main nuclear complexes, had been under seals since the 1991 Gulf war but was hard hit by a wave of looting that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime last month.
IAEA chief Dr Mohamed El Baradei has warned of a potential humanitarian disaster if nuclear material were to fall into the wrong hands.
In a letter to the US government on April 30th, Mr ElBaradei had urged Washington "to allow the IAEA to send a mission to Al-Tuwaitha to investigate the disturbing reports of looting at the nuclear site".
AFP