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Iraq lets U.N. experts check monitoring
equipment
By Hassan Hafidh
BAGHDAD, Nov 2 - Iraq has allowed a
United Nations team to visit Iraqi weapons sites to maintain
surveillance equipment, a U.N. official said on Monday.
Caroline Cross, special assistant to the director of the Baghdad
Monitoring and Verification Centre, also said that teams from
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had gone
out to sites for a second successive day.
"A technical team from UNSCOM (the U.N. Special
Commission disarming Iraq) has gone out to maintain
monitoring equipment," Cross told Reuters.
"They have IMD officials to go along with them," she said.
The Iraqi Monitoring Directorate is the Iraqi body liaising
with UNSCOM.
Iraq said on Saturday it was halting all cooperation with
UNSCOM inspectors and monitors until the Security Council
reviewed the lifting of sanctions and removed Richard Butler,
the chairman of UNSCOM, which is in charge of scrapping
Iraq's chemical and biological weapons.
But Baghdad said the Vienna-based IAEA, the U.N. watchdog
for nuclear weapons, could continue its monitoring work in
Iraq.
"IAEA teams have gone out to monitor sites as usual," Cross
said.
UNSCOM and the IAEA maintain surveillance cameras in
hundreds of Iraqi sites suspected of producing weapons of
mass destruction.
Cross said it would be some time before instructions came
from UNSCOM headquarters on what to do next.
The Security Council has unanimously condemned Iraq's
move and demanded that Baghdad end its non-cooperation
"immediately and unconditionally". Iraq on Sunday rejected
the council's condemnation.
Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said on Sunday Baghdad
would not back down on its decision, no matter what the rest
of the world threatened to do in retaliation. It had already
decided in August, at the start of the latest stand-off, not to
allow the U.N. experts to inspect any new sites.
The Security Council has entrusted UNSCOM and the IAEA
with verifying that Iraq has destroyed its weapons of mass
destruction so that international sanctions imposed for its
1990 invasion of Kuwait can be lifted.
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