Iraq said yesterday it wants the UN Security Council to "act firmly" on reports that Washington used UN weapons inspectors to spy on the Iraqi leadership.
Meanwhile a US F-16 fighter jet fired a missile at an anti-aircraft missile site in northern Iraq, apparently hitting the battery's radar in the latest military confrontation, the Pentagon said.
Mr Salah al-Mokhtar, a newly-appointed Iraqi ambassador and former editor of the government newspaper, Al-Jumhuriya, said of the spying issue: "The Security Council and UN Secretary-General are required to act firmly on these serious accusations which prove to the world that Iraq's grievances were justified. Now all the members of the Security Council must take a stand on this matter," he said.
The Wall Street Journal said yesterday UNSCOM in 1998 used a US eavesdropping device to pick up encrypted communications among Iraq's leading generals.
The device sent the data by satellite to the US National Security Agency (NSA) which then relayed some of it back to UNSCOM, an unidentified US official and another source familiar with the operation told the US daily.
The Washington Post and Boston Globe had already reported on Wednesday that the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, had received "credible evidence" showing Washington had used UNSCOM's eavesdropping intelligence in its effort to undermine President Saddam Hussein. The US, on the heels of the newspaper reports, admitted through an unidentified official that Washington had collected some military information on Iraq while participating in UN inspections.
A UN spokesman, Mr Fred Eckhard, said yesterday that press reports "tend to lend more credence" to the initial allegations. "If these allegations were true it would be damaging to the United Nations disarmament efforts worldwide."
Russia's ambassador to the UN, Mr Sergei Lavrov, seized on the reports to renew a call for the replacement of the UNSCOM chief, Mr Richard Butler.
A former UN weapons inspector, Mr Scott Ritter, told Australian radio yesterday he believed the US had used information compiled by a UN commission to conduct its recent bombing raids on Iraq. Mr Ritter said there was no doubt the US had access to information compiled by UNSCOM about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and about the Iraqi President.
This information was then used in the December bombings of Iraq by the US and Britain, he said.
Mr Ritter resigned in August over the conduct of weapons inspections.
Mr Butler, an Australian diplomat, reiterated denials he made at the UN that his team had been involved in spying. "There's no spying. I want to rebut that completely," Mr Butler told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio by telephone. "UNSCOM has never conducted intelligence activities for any of the 40 or 50 member-states who support us, of which the United States is only one," Mr Butler said.
An influential Baghdad daily, meanwhile, said Iraq would reject new formulas for UN arms inspections in the wake of last month's air war. "Iraq rejects the new offers linked to UNSCOM," said Babel newspaper, which is run by President Saddam's son Uday.
An exiled Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi Communist Party, said yesterday 81 Iraqis, including 18 military officers, were executed in Baghdad for political or security-related reasons during the US-led air strikes on Iraq last month.
The US Defence Department said of yesterday's action in the air: "The radar stopped beaming at precisely the time the HARM (High-Speed, Anti-Radiation Missile) was to impact the radar, so we assume that it was a hit,"
A spokesman said the battery aimed at the the jets, but did not fire.