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Blix asks to finish the job using his vast experience

As the US and Britain try to explain why they have not found unconventional weapons in Iraq, chief UN inspector Hans Blix wants the Security Council to utilize a decade of arms research and allow UN experts to finish the job.

Blix, who is retiring after his contract ends on June 30, on Thursday gives an oral version of his final report to the council, whose members, including ally Britain, have made clear to the US they do not consider the inspection commission's work finished in Iraq.

"I would expect this to be his last appearance before the council before he returns to Sweden at the end of June," said Blix's spokesman Ewen Buchanan.

"He is making an assessment of all our activities in Iraq in the three months we are there," he said.

But there is little doubt that council members, who will meet in a private session after hearing Blix in an open meeting, will want to discuss the future of his UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC.

"It's not just about whether you have them back or have them out," said Russia's UN ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, this month's council president.

"It's about substance, and the substance is we all must know whether there are still some remnants of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," he said.

The US, which has found no illegal weapons after examining more than 200 suspected sites over the past 11 weeks, had faulted Blix for failing to produce tough reports on the government of former president Saddam Hussein before his mission was truncated on the eve of the war in March.

The failure to find unconventional weapons has developed into a political issue in both the US and Britain, with top George W. Bush administration officials defending intelligence used to justify the war. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair has had to do the same with parliamentarians pressing for an independent inquiry.

UN inspections to certify Iraq no longer had chemical, biological, ballistic and nuclear weapons began after the 1991 Gulf War and were terminated in 1998 after the experts were withdrawn on the eve of a US bombing raid. The inspectors returned last Nov. 27 and left on March 18.

In a written report submitted on Monday, Blix said his staff, sifting through millions of pages of data, should not be cut drastically but "engage in summarizing and digesting the unique experienced gained" during it search for weapons.

Blix, in his report, said that UNMOVIC found no evidence of banned weapons but at the same time said Baghdad had not presented convincing data, especially on biological agents and proscribed long-range missiles.

"The long list of items unaccounted for ... was neither shortened by the inspections, nor by the Iraqi declarations and documentation," Blix wrote in the report.

Iraq, he said, had never declared the existence of two mobile laboratories US officials said were used to make biological weapons. Blix also said that Iraq, shortly before the war, hid the origin of some missile engines it imported.
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