Baghdad in bid to scrap drone after inspection

Iraq tried to dismantle an undeclared new drone aircraft last week after it was discovered by inspectors from the United Nations, according to UN and U.S. officials.

Inspectors from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmo-vic) first discovered the remote piloted vehicle, or RPV, at the Samarra East flight-test facility north of Baghdad in mid-February, officials said.

With a wingspan of almost 25 feet, the RPV could have a range far in excess of the 150km allowed by UN regulations.

The inspectors raised questions about the drone last Tuesday when they visited the Ibn Fernas Centre in northern Baghdad, where RPVs and other unman-ned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are developed and produced.

When they returned to the flight-test site the next day for another look at the large drone, they found two such RPVs – and found the Iraqis dismantling one of them, as well as two smaller RPVs, according to a senior administration official. "They apparently did not expect the inspectors," the official said.

Under last November's UN resolution, Iraq was required to declare UAV and RPV aircraft because Baghdad had experimented with them in the 1980s and 1990s as delivery vehicles for chemical or biological agents.

The RPV being dismantled had been fabricated from the fuel tank of one of those vehicles, an L-29 Czech-made small airplane. Hans Blix, Unmovic's executive director, reported Friday to the Security Council that his inspectors had raised questions with Iraq about its unmanned aircraft.

But U.S. officials Monday took public issue with his failure to disclose the problem encountered last week, calling it an example of Iraq's refusal to cooperate and disarm.

In a closed Security Council meeting Monday, Blix defended his handling of the issue, saying he does not report on all new findings by inspectors.

Although the newly designed RPV should have been declared, he said, it was not certain it would be proscribed since it still may be just a "prototype."

The first public indication of the new RPV came Monday when Unmovic put on its website the 173-page document Blix gave privately to Security Council members last Friday, which was entitled "Unresolved Disarmament Issues, Iraq's Proscribed Weapons Programmes."

In that document, Blix outlined dozens of other unresolved issues involving Iraq's weapons, and possible ways the Baghdad government could solve outstanding issues.

Iraq considered RPVs as potential delivery vehicles for biological warfare agents as early as 1988, but the idea was rejected at the time because it was believed the drones could not carry enough of the agent to be effective.

Hussain Kamal, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussain who defected from Baghdad in 1995, told UN inspectors and U.S. interrogators that he had looked at long-range RPVs as a way to slowly distribute chemical or biological agents on Israel.

In its December 7, 2002, declaration to the UN of its weapons of mass destruction, Iraq reported it had developed two RPVs that could fly only up to an hour.

More recently, it discovered another RPV that was not declared with the 7.45-metre wingspan, which inspectors were told had been test-flown. In its recent document, Unmovic said Iraq should provide "credible evidence" for the purposes of the RPVs.

That includes names of the Iraqis who worked on them and foreign suppliers involved in the project, along with details of importation of the engines, guidance systems and airframes.