Interviews begin with N-experts

The United Nation's nuclear arms watchdog has begun conducting private closed-door interviews with Iraq's atomic energy experts, marking a critical new stage in the UN's effort to verify Baghdad's claims that it has destroyed its most lethal weapons of mass destruction, according to a spokesman for the agency.

Drawing from a list of hundreds of Iraqi officials linked to Iraq's former nuclear weapons programme, officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are seeking to determine whether Baghdad has secretly begun to rebuild its former nuclear arms programme since UN inspectors left the country in December 1998 on the eve of a U.S. and British bombing campaign.

While IAEA inspectors have routinely questioned Iraqi scientists at former nuclear weapons sites since they resumed inspections last month, this is the first time that they have asserted their right to conduct face-to-face interviews with individuals without the presence of an Iraqi government minder. It sets the UN's nuclear sleuths ahead of their counterparts at the UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic), who have yet to conduct confidential interviews with Iraq's biological, chemical weapons and ballistic missile experts.

"We are moving from an information gathering phase to a more probing, investigative phase," the IAEA's chief spokesman Mark Gwozdecki said in a telephone interview from the agency's Vienna headquarters. "We can't talk about who, how or how many" individuals inspectors are speaking to.

The Bush administration has stepped up pressure on Mohammed El Baradei, the Egyptian director general of the IAEA, and Hans Blix, the Swedish executive chairman of Unmovic, to speed the pace of inspections and to exercise their authority to question some Iraqi specialists outside the country, where they can speak freely without the fear of reprisals.

El Baradei said in a recent interview that he would interview Iraqi scientists abroad if he received assurances from Washington that they could obtain political asylum or return safely to Iraq.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service