U.N. Arms Inspectors Say Iraq Sites Were Cleaned Out

UNITED NATIONS, June 7 -- A number of sites in Iraq known to have contained equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been either cleaned out or destroyed, U.N. weapons inspectors said Monday.

The inspectors' report said they did not know whether the items, which had been monitored by the United Nations, were at the sites during the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

U.N. inspectors were pulled from Iraq just before the war began in March 2003, and the United States has refused to allow them to return, instead deploying its own teams to search for weapons of mass destruction.

"It is possible that some of the materials may have been removed from Iraq by looters of sites and sold as scrap," the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission said in its quarterly report to the Security Council.

UNMOVIC said its experts and a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was responsible for dismantling Iraq's nuclear program, were jointly investigating items from Iraq that were discovered in a scrap yard in the Dutch port of Rotterdam.

Through photographs taken during an initial IAEA investigation, UNMOVIC said it discovered that SA-2 engines used in Iraq's banned Al Samoud-2 missile program were among the scrap.

Commission experts examined one missile engine at the site and discovered from the serial number that it had been tagged by U.N. inspectors in the past and had not been declared as having been fired.

Representatives at the scrap yard indicated that five to 12 similar engines had been seen there in January and February, and that more could have passed through the yard unnoticed, the report said.

Company staff said other items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys bearing the inscription "Iraq" or "Baghdad" had been observed in shipments delivered from the Middle East since November 2003, it said.

UNMOVIC experts determined that a number of items were composed of heat-resistant Inconel and titanium -- both subject to monitoring because of their possible dual use in legitimate civilian activities and banned weapons production, the report said. The commission said its investigation was continuing.