Experts Visit Alleged Scud Factory in Iraq

U.N. experts combed seven sites in Iraq for banned weapons Thursday, including a plant said to have made modified Scud missiles, and attended a test launch of a short-range ballistic missile.

Iraq again vehemently denied that it has any Scud missiles left, or any weapons of mass destruction, and gave rare praise to what it said was the professionalism of the U.N. teams.

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency drove to Al Nidaa Public Company in Zafaraniyah, a suburb of Baghdad. The facility, run by Iraq’s Military Industrialization Commission, produces metal molds and tools.

According to a report by United Nations inspectors who left Iraq in 1998, the facility was used to produce Al-Hussein missiles, an Iraqi variation of the Soviet Scud B missile.

Al Nidaa, built in 1990, was bombed in 1993 and again in 1998 by Western planes.

“Of course, we have no Scud missiles, absolutely,” said Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, an Iraqi official serving as a liaison with the inspectors.

Amin praised the inspectors’ work, saying: “We appreciate the professionalism with which the inspections are undertaken. Although some of the questions are repeated, there are no silly questions.”

At the missile test pad, about 120 miles west of Baghdad, a U.N. team attended a test launch of a short-range ballistic missile being developed by Iraq. The missile range falls within that allowed under U.N. resolutions, officials said.

Meanwhile, Iraq for the first time invited to Baghdad the U.N. envoy in charge of accounting for stolen Kuwaiti property and prisoners of war from Iraq’s 1990-91 occupation of its southern neighbor, a U.N. official said Thursday.

Until now Iraq had boycotted talks with the envoy, Russia’s former U.N. ambassador, Yuli M. Vorontsov.