Tensions Rise Over U.N. Standoff in Baghdad : Inspection: Iraqi protests against team at ministry escalate. Security Council discusses ways to force compliance.

A team of U.N. weapons inspectors leaving Baghdad on Tuesday said that tensions are rising in the Iraqi capital because of the standoff over their colleagues’ demands to search Iraq’s Agriculture Ministry.

“The security situation is growing more tense,” said Richard Hooper, leader of a nine-member nuclear inspection team that was in Iraq for eight days. “We essentially quarantined our team to the hotel.”

He said that demonstrations against the U.N. team standing watch outside the ministry since July 5 have become almost constant. Baghdad has rejected the inspectors’ demands to enter the ministry, which is said to contain documents about Iraqi weaponry.

Chanting demonstrators have pelted the U.N. inspectors’ cars with eggs and vegetables and slashed their tires in demonstrations over the last three weeks. Rolf Ekeus, the U.N. official in charge of weapons inspections, said in New York that the demonstrators were coming too close to the inspectors.

“It won’t go on. You will soon see something,” he told the Associated Press, without elaborating.

At the United Nations, officials said that some possible measures for dealing with the Iraqi defiance were being discussed by individual governments Tuesday but that no firm proposals have been drafted yet for the Security Council to consider.

Iraq’s U.N. ambassador was defiant in the face of possible military intervention. “Throwing a bomb or two in Baghdad or here or there is not going to change Iraq’s position,” Ambassador Abdul Amir Anbari told reporters.

The Security Council, meanwhile, rejected Baghdad’s argument that any dealings between Iraq and the United Nations should be conducted outside the Western-dominated U.N. commission that has been set up to oversee Iraqi compliance with the Persian Gulf War cease-fire pact.

In other Iraq-related developments:

* U.S. officials could not confirm widespread rumors that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had been assassinated. A senior Administration official said there was “no intelligence community information” to support the story.

* In Amman, Jordan, Secretary of State James A. Baker III warned King Hussein that there has been some leakage of goods across the Jordanian border with Iraq in apparent violation of the U.N. embargo, but Baker downplayed the U.S. complaints by saying the situation has been improving.

* As to possible responses to Iraqi intransigence, Pentagon officials said Tuesday that the options range from punitive strikes against remaining sites in which nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were researched, produced or stored to more symbolic strikes against strongholds of the Iraqi military, including Hussein’s Republican Guard.

Times staff writers Jim Mann in Amman and Melissa Healy, David Lauter, Art Pine and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this article.