Defiant Iraq on Collision Course

Iraq placed itself on a collision course with the US yesterday by flatly denying it has possessed any biological, chemical or nuclear-related weapons for at least 10 years.

General Amir al-Sadi, an adviser to President Saddam Hussein, admitted at a press conference in Baghdad that Iraq had come "close" to developing a nuclear bomb but that programme had long been abandoned. He insisted there had been no production of chemical or biological weapons since the Gulf war.

The US, which claims to have intelligence that Iraq retains banned weapons, will hotly dispute Iraq's declaration. Baghdad's stance came as UN weapons inspectors began sifting through 12,000 pages of documents it handed over on Saturday, as required by a UN resolution. Any failure to provide a full declaration about its alleged weapons of mass destruction could provide the catalyst for a US-led attack.

The US president, George Bush, appeared willing to be patient rather than embark on a headlong rush to war. "We will judge the declaration's honesty and completeness only after we have thoroughly examined it, and that will take some time," he said.

The bulk of the documentation, about 10,000 pages, was flown to the New York headquarters of the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission, which is carrying out the hunt for biological and chemical weapons. The remainder went to the international atomic energy agency, which is leading the search for nuclear-related weapons, in Vienna.

At the press conference, Gen Sadi, 64, an urbane scientist who studied chemistry in Britain and is the regime's most senior official charged with negotiating over the inspections, said he hoped the documentation would satisfy the inspectors and the US "because it is currently accurate, comprehensive and truthful".

He said new elements centred on the period from 1998, when the inspectors pulled out, to the present. Most of it was related to civilian technologies which have potential dual use - both civilian and military functions.

He said the declaration insisted there had been no biological weapons programme since 1991, a fact strongly disputed by the weapons inspectors who were in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. The declaration provided "first-class evidence" to support Iraq's claim it had destroyed its stocks of chemical and biological agents and the general challenged the US and Britain to prove the contrary.

Asked about Iraq's nuclear programme, he said the regime had come close to mak ing a bomb but had not completed its work before the Gulf war. "We had not reached the final assembly of the bomb or tested it," he said. "It is for the IAEA to judge how close we came."

Gen Sadi said the declaration began by detailing Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile weapons programmes until the war. It went on to describe all the 900-plus sites across the country operating dual-use equipment. These included hospital labs, tanneries, breweries and fertiliser plants.

The chapters on nuclear activity, for example, run to 2,081 pages for the years up to 1991 and only 300 pages to cover the past 11.

Russia, one of the UN security council members most sympathetic to Iraq, said yesterday the fact Baghdad had met the security council deadline for handing over the documents a day early showed it was complying with the UN resolution to disarm.

But the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told BBC television President Saddam's past disclosures had been "a pack of lies" and it remained to be seen whether the declaration would follow the same pattern.

The UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, who is due to inform the UN security council tomorrow of the documents' contents, is to sanitise them, refusing to make public any material that could be used for the proliferation of weapons.

The US has criticised the slow start made by the inspectors. More inspectors arrived in Iraq yesterday and others are due tomorrow, bringing the deployment to 70. The inspectors argue that they entered Iraq faster than required by the UN resolution and that most of them have been seconded from other professions.