Inspectors Access Once ‘Sensitive’ Iraqi Sites

International weapons investigators Saturday made an unannounced inspection at a military post that Iraq once declared “sensitive” and subject to restricted access.

On the third day of renewed inspections, U.N. monitors received unrestricted access to the Chemical Corps base, as mandated by the Security Council when it sent them back to Iraq with powers to inspect anyplace, anytime. Another team, meanwhile, inspected a complex that was once the heart of Iraq’s aborted effort to build nuclear bombs.

In both cases, as expected, the U.N. teams did not disclose their findings, holding them for later reports. But their spokesman indicated that they were satisfied with Iraqi cooperation.

“They were able to conduct inspections as they planned,” Hiro Ueki said.

On the Iraqi side, the commander of the Balad military post north of Baghdad said: “They found nothing.”

The inspections resumed under a resolution giving Iraq a “final opportunity” to shut down any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs or face “serious consequences.”

Inspections in the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf War, led to the destruction of many tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, and the equipment to produce them. U.N. teams also dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons program before it could produce a bomb. But that inspection regime ended in 1998.

Those inspectors believed that they never found all of Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction, particularly chemical arms. The United States now threatens war to disarm the Baghdad government if the new inspections cannot achieve that goal.

In the 1990s, Iraq declared some facilities to be “sensitive sites.” Under informal agreements with U.N. officials, advance notice was given of inspections at those sites and the number of inspectors was limited.

Balad was one such site, Ueki said Saturday, but he didn’t know the circumstances of its prior inspection.

On Saturday, a convoy of four U.N. vehicles, trailed by journalists’ cars, rolled up a country road to the back gate, sending soldiers scrambling. Iraqi officers, who accompany the U.N. inspectors to their undisclosed destinations, shouted orders for the area to be “frozen,” or placed under U.N. procedures for sealing off inspection sites.

The 10 or so inspectors then spent almost five hours crisscrossing the small installation, paying close attention to what appeared to be crates of ordnance in open sheds.

A team of nuclear specialists, meanwhile, inspected two sites south of Baghdad, including Milad, formerly known as Al Furat, where Iraqi scientists and engineers in 1989-90 made progress in testing gas centrifuges, sophisticated technology that can “enrich” uranium for use in nuclear bombs.