U.N. Tells U.S.-Led Team to Leave Iraq

The United Nations has told its weapons team in Iraq led by American Scott Ritter to leave the country, a U.N. spokesman said Thursday.

“The team has been told to leave [today],” U.N. spokesman Juan-Carlos Brandt said.

The group, which was blocked by Baghdad from carrying out its duties, originally was supposed to leave today but under a plan in which it had completed its work.

U.N. officials believed that Richard Butler, the head of the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, in charge of scrapping Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, saw no point in extending the visit that has led to a crisis between Iraq and the United Nations.

Butler will be in Baghdad on Monday and Tuesday for talks with Iraqi officials on the banning of the team and the right of his inspectors to have access to all sites. Iraq has set up several categories of sites and excluded President Saddam Hussein’s palaces as well as areas around them that include other government buildings.

Iraq has prevented the inspectors led by Ritter from operating, saying the team is dominated by Americans and Britons hostile to Baghdad.

The team was blocked Tuesday and Wednesday from carrying out its work, and Thursday Butler told them not to make another attempt.

Iraq has accused Ritter, a former American Marine captain, of being a spy and following hard-line policies of the United States. He is currently leading 28 inspectors in Baghdad, 10 of whom are Americans and five of whom are British.

Meanwhile, a senior U.N. arms official denied reports Thursday that a search for evidence of Iraqi testing of chemical and biological weapons on humans was based on a picture obtained several years ago.

Although a U.N. weapons team carried out inspections in Baghdad on Monday to follow up evidence of such tests on prisoners, the evidence was not based on the photograph.

The deputy chief of UNSCOM, Charles Duelfer, told Reuters: “We have a picture, but we don’t interpret it as being evidence of widespread testing of chemical or biological agents on humans. We don’t know really how to interpret it.”

Duelfer, an American, said the picture was of a human arm with lesions on it.

It was found in 1995 as part of a large cache of documents unearthed at a farm that had belonged to Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Baghdad’s secret military programs, who defected to Jordan that year.

The Iraqi authorities led UNSCOM officials to a locked chicken house at the so-called Haidar farm containing boxes packed with more than half a million pages of documentation.

The Iraqis said they had been unaware of the material until Hussein Kamel defected. He was killed in February 1996, shortly after returning to Baghdad.

Duelfer said it was not the picture found at the farm that prompted Monday’s search for proof of human testing but “an accumulation” of other evidence that he declined to specify.

After Monday’s inspections led by Ritter, Iraq said his team would not be permitted to continue its work because it included too many Americans and Britons. Other U.N. teams have been allowed to operate normally.

In a letter to the Security Council on Tuesday, Iraqi U.N. envoy Nizar Hamdoun said that, in connection with an intelligence site inspected Monday, Ritter had “claimed that in the summer of 1995, between June and August, a number of prisoners had been sent from this site to Abu Ghraib prison and from there to a secret location where tests of chemical and biological agents had been performed on them.”