UN agency wants to investigate Iraq nuclear looting

The United Nations nuclear watchdog agency said yesterday it had asked the United States to let it send a mission to Iraq to investigate reports of widespread looting at the country's nuclear facilities.

"(International Atomic Energy Agency chief) Mohamed ElBaradei has written to the US with a request to send a mission to Iraq...to investigate the state of the facilities there," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told Reuters.

"We have not yet received a response," she said, declining to give further details about the letter. "We have been assured by the US that they would secure these facilities, but the agency finds these reports (of looting) disturbing."

Last month the IAEA asked the US to secure Iraq's nuclear facilities to protect them from looters in the post-war chaos. Washington assured the UN it would prevent the removal of material from these sites.

But on Sunday the Washington Post reported that sites housing large amounts of highly radioactive material appeared to have been looted and that it was impossible to say whether nuclear materials were missing.

The IAEA, whose nuclear weapons inspectors returned to Baghdad last November after a four-year hiatus, has a detailed inventory of radioactive materials stored at the Tuwaitha nuclear research facility and other sites in the country which may have been looted.

Tuwaitha had been sealed by the IAEA, but US forces were reported to have broken some of the seals last month and to have entered the site.

The mission ElBaradei wants to send to Iraq would be separate from the teams who hunted for signs Baghdad renewed its ambitious atomic weapons programme, as Washington had alleged, before the US decided to use military force to disarm Iraq.

"This would be an investigative mission to find out what has happened at the facilities," Fleming said.

While most of the radioactive material found at these sites would be unusable for atomic weapons, the IAEA is concerned that some of the material could end up in the hands of terrorists who could use it for so-called dirty bombs.

A dirty bomb is made by attaching radioactive material to a conventional explosive like dynamite to disperse it over a wide area. These bombs are aimed more at creating panic than physical damage.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday he had no information from military or intelligence sources about the lootings referred to in the Washington Post's eyewitness report.

"I don't know that there was a special concern that there was nuclear-related material at that particular site," he said.

The US has frustrated ElBaradei and chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, whose UNMOVIC monitoring and verification agency hunted for Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and ballistic arms, by keeping them out of post-war Iraq.