A team of weapons inspectors, studying satellite photography, has identified several nuclear-related sites in Iraq where new construction or other unexplained changes have occurred since the last international inspections nearly four years ago, a UN official said on Thursday.
Experts in New York and Vienna have continued to scrutinize aerial photographs and pore over intelligence, even after UN inspectors pulled out of Iraq in December 1998 on the eve of bombing by the US and Britain.
A team of about 15 experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna noted the new structures and other alterations in photographs shot by a commercial satellite, said Jacques Baute, the French physicist who is the team leader. The shots were compared to pictures and information from the sites gathered by inspectors the last time they were there. He declined to identify the exact locations.
"We are very curious to see what is under the roof," Baute said. "There are some activities that could be part of prohibited activities, but we have nothing now that allows us to draw a conclusion."
"We want to open any door we want to open," he said.
Officials at the nuclear team in Vienna and representing a separate team on chemical and biological weapons said UN inspectors are equipped, trained and ready to go and could begin their work in Iraq within weeks if Baghdad gave the go-ahead. But it would take about a year to complete work to verify that Iraq was not developing prohibited weapons, and only if Iraq cooperated fully, they said.
President Bush, facing concern from many nations over the possibility of a military strike by the US against Saddam Hussein, plans to consult over the next two days with Security Council leaders to see if new action can be taken to confront Iraq on the weapons inspections.
But even if inspectors were allowed to return, UN officials acknowledge that their timetable is slower than administration officials say they want. The inspectors, arguing that their work is technical and painstaking, said it would take them about 12 months to examine locations, scrutinize documents and analyze samples to get a full picture of Iraq's weapons efforts -- if they could work unimpeded.
Iraq has continued to allow regular annual inspections of one warehouse in a Baghdad suburb, part of the Tawaitha nuclear research center, by a different team of the atomic agency. In their last visit, last January, the inspectors did not detect any illegal weapons activity there.
But Iraq has not been reporting to the UN its "dual-use" imports, substances that might be used for weapons production, as it is required to do, according to a report released on Thursday by Hans Blix, the head of the biological and chemical weapons team.
That team, which is based in New York, was re-organized by the Security Council two years ago to make it more professional and finance it with revenues from the sale of Iraqi oil, which is monitored by the UN. The team, which also will inspect for long-range missiles, now includes 63 permanent staff members from 27 countries who are employed full-time by the UN. Another 220 experts have been trained and are on call to go to Iraq.
The teams have been "mining" the vast store of data collected in eight years of inspections before 1998 and intelligence provided by the US and other governments, officials there said. They have an agenda of dozens of tasks to undertake as soon as they return.
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