United Nations weapons inspectors have "evidence" that Iraq is concealing weapons of mass destruction at sites declared off-limits, the top UN arms monitor said yesterday.
The UN Special Commission chairman, Mr Richard Butler, said at a news conference here that "we have evidence, or reason to believe that prohibited items have been and/or do exist in places that would be within that category for presidential or sovereign sites". However, he refused to give further details "because that would blow the whole thing".
He spoke after informing the UN Security Council on Thursday that he feared Iraq's "absolute" refusal to admit the UN inspectors to so-called presidential and sovereign sites covered "quite a substantial number" of places. The number of sites in question, he said, was much larger than the "four or five" palaces mentioned by Iraq's deputy prime minister, Mr Tareq Aziz, during their talks earlier this week in Baghdad.
Foreign journalists in Iraq were given a tour of six presidential palaces yesterday, in a move Mr Butler described as "pure propaganda".
"If you take the category of presidential and sovereign sites as being as large as we think it now looks like being . . . do we have reason to go to some of those places? Yes," said Mr Butler. "Is that because we have information that suggests that we may well find prohibited items in some of those places? Yes we do." Mr Butler noted that in the past, Iraqi officials had denied entry to the inspectors searching for suspected concealed weaponry or documents at such sites. "And that does little to reduce the idea provided to us through our information that there may be prohibited items in those places. Otherwise why else are we being being blocked?" said the Australian diplomat.
There was no reason, he said, to believe that Iraqi weaponry had been moved into the presidential or sovereign sites during a three-week pause of inspections triggered by a showdown over the role of US inspectors.
Baghdad's threat to expel the US inspectors, accused of being spies, caused a three-week showdown which was defused only when Moscow, on November 20th, persuaded the Iraqi leadership to back down. In return, the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Yevgeni Primakov, promised to work for an early lifting of sanctions. The sanctions, imposed after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, can be lifted only when the UN inspectors certify that Iraq has eliminated all its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and longrange missiles.
Earlier, Mr Butler said that Baghdad was proposing "to have sanctuaries within Iraq where we could never look. Now that's illegal and it defeats our purpose in getting rid of those weapons."