Iraqi Leaves Home With U.N. Inspectors
Jan 16, 9:00 AM (ET)
By HAMZA HENDAWI
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - An Iraqi physicist, carrying a box of documents, left his home Thursday with U.N. inspectors who interviewed him and another scientist for about six hours.
Faleh Hassan left with the U.N. personnel to an unknown destination after an animated and apparently heated discussion between Iraqi officials and U.N. weapons experts.
The interviews came as the chief of the U.N. nuclear agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Moscow he intends to ask the Security Council for more time to complete inspections in Iraq.
"We still have quite a bit of work to do, and therefore we are going to ask for at least a few months to be able to complete our job," ElBaradei said.
In Belgium, Hans Blix, who along with ElBaradei leads the inspections in Iraq, warned Iraq Thursday it must cooperate more actively if it wants to avoid war. "Iraq must do more than they have done so far," Blix said after briefing European Union officials.
Hassan, the physicist, had a box of documents with him as he got into a U.N. car with Dimitri Perricos, a team leader among the U.N. experts searching for banned nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and programs to develop them.
"I'm not happy about all of this," Perricos could be heard telling Iraqi officials assigned to accompany the inspectors before driving off with Hassan in a convoy of U.N., Iraqi and journalists' vehicles.
Earlier, the inspectors were seen going through documents at a table set up near Hassan's front door. They had also been engaged in an animated discussion with the Iraqi liaison officers.
The inspectors - along with the Iraqi escorts and journalists - had arrived in al-Ghazalia, a west Baghdad residential district, shortly before 9 a.m. Thursday and cordoned off a street by parking their vehicles across the road at both ends.
The inspectors, as is usually the case, did not speak to reporters. An Iraqi official on the scene said they entered the homes of Hassan and Shaker el-Jibouri, another nuclear scientist, who live next door to one another.
The inspectors spent about six hours in the two houses before leaving with Hassan. Inspectors also searched a shack on a nearby lot.
Thursday's house searches and a visit a day before to one of President Saddam Hussein's palaces suggested the inspectors are using new intelligence in their search for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and programs to develop them.
The United States and Britain insist Iraq retains such weapons and have threatened military action unless its government cooperates fully with the inspectors.
Iraq handed over to the inspectors a list of its scientists in late December. In addition, U.N. officials have said they are receiving intelligence from the United States, which claims to have proof Iraq is hiding information about banned weapons.
Blix and ElBaradei were to visit Baghdad on Sunday and Monday to press Iraqi officials for more information.
ElBaradei, speaking to reporters in Moscow on Thursday, also said inspectors need more from Iraq, including interviews with scientists and documents that would make it possible to determine whether past weapons programs had been discontinued.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana backed Blix's demands for more cooperation, saying, "It is not enough that (Iraq) opens doors...the position has to be much more proactive."
"The time is not infinite," Solana added.
Iraq got similar advice from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who urged it "to complete what the inspectors described as gaps in the report" that Baghdad delivered to the United Nations.
"The current crisis has put all the countries of the region in a state of uneasiness," Mubarak was quoted as telling top Egyptian editors who accompanied him on a trip this week to Saudi Arabia.
The search of the scientists' homes was likely to increase resentment of the inspectors, already accused by Iraq of being intrusive after Wednesday's palace search. At the Baghdad palace, the inspectors searched two office complexes and opened safes. Iraq has long resented searches in Saddam's palaces - of which there are dozens - calling them offenses to its sovereignty.
Iraq's Foreign Ministry called Wednesday's palace inspection visit a "clearly provocative step" that had "no relation at all to so-called disarmament."
Perricos, who led the palace inspection team and the inspection of the scientists' houses Thursday, said the two office complexes in the presidential compound attracted the inspectors' interest because satellite images showed they had high walls and a double fence.
In the past, Iraqi officials resisted palace searches. But the current inspection regime, backed by a stringent U.N. Security Council resolution, allows surprise inspections of any site.
Also Thursday, and Iraqi official said a second team of inspectors visited a site belonging to an Iranian dissident group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, just west of Baghdad in an area called Abu Ghraib.
However, a Mujahedeen Khalq spokesman said inspectors did not visit one of their sites, telling The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that the inspectors had instead toured an Iraqi military camp close to one of the group's facilities.
Inspectors searched a site belonging to the group on Wednesday. The Mujahedeen Khalq, regarded by the United States as a terrorist group, seeks the violent overthrow of the Iranian government and has military bases in eastern Iraq along the Iranian border. It often claims responsibility for rocket and mortar attacks inside Iran.
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