UN arms experts resumed inspections in Iraq today after a two-day break, visiting military and nuclear research facilities south of the capital.
The visits, ending a break taken for a Muslim holiday, came before an expected Iraqi declaration on its weapons programmes to meet a Sunday deadline set last month by the UN Security Council.
One team of experts revisited Iraq's main nuclear research facility while a second team examined a new military industrial research centre.
A team of inspectors from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) examined a compound housing the al-Quds (Jerusalem) General Company in the town of al- Iskandariyah, 40 km south of Baghdad.
The company is part of Iraq's state Military Industrialisation Commission (MIC). Officials said it focuses mainly on research and it was established after UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998. The experts, accompanied by Iraqi officials, entered the site unhindered, but journalists were kept outside.
Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) drove to al-Tuweitha nuclear facility, just south of the Iraqi capital. IAEA experts had spent five hours at Tuweitha Nuclear Research Centre, the main nuclear programme site, on December 4th.It was not clear why they returned to the site. The Centre, which had been monitored by the IAEA in the past, has housed several research reactors and included activities such as plutonium separation and waste processing, uranium metallurgy, neutron initiator development and work on a number of methods of uranium enrichment.