Chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix will brief the Security Council on Thursday, it was announced this evening amid mounting scepticism about US and British government allegations over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Council president Mr Sergei Lavrov, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, said Dr Blix would present his latest quarterly report, starting two and a half weeks before the inspectors were withdrawn on March 17th, three days ahead of the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The United States and Britain insist that they have taken over the job of finding the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons which they claim were hidden by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein before he was toppled.
But so far their forces have unearthed little substantial. US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have had to deny reports that they fabricated an excuse for going to war.
"If they don't find anything, obviously there are going to be lots of questions," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told reporters on his return to New York today from the G-8 summit in Evian, France.
"What we are expecting on Thursday is to hear from the professional person on the basis of professional analysis what he and his team think about the current situation with the disarmament of Iraq," Lavrov told reporters.
Asked whether Russia would push for Blix's UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) to be allowed to return to Iraq, he replied: "It's not about whether you have them back or have them out, it's about substance."
It was important for the council to know whether there were remnants of programmes for making weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, Lavrov said.
"We don't want the current security problems and political hustling inside Iraq to result in pieces of the WMD programmes to get into the wrong hands," he said.
In Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said seven inspectors would arrive in Iraq on Friday to investigate whether any radioactive material was missing from a nuclear site that was pillaged near Baghdad.
"They will go to the nuclear research centre at Al-Tuwaitha to perform a safeguard inspection," a spokesman said.
Lavrov said the IAEA would not be represented at Thursday's council meeting, which would examine only Blix's report.
The report, made available to reporters on Monday, was inevitably inconclusive.
In it, Dr Blix said UNMOVIC had conducted 731 inspections at 411 sites in the 15 weeks available to it, but found no evidence that Iraq had resumed production of weapons which were banned under UN sanctions after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
On the other hand, "little progress was made" on a long list of weapons which Iraq claimed to have destroyed but which remained unaccounted for, notably a large number of R-400 bombs containing biological agents and up to 16,000 litres of anthrax, he said.
Mr Lavrov noted that the United States and Britain had agreed to keep the Security Council informed of their own efforts to search for Iraqi weapons.
"Both delegations confirm that this will be done, not necessarily on Thursday," he said.
"Absent that we can rely only on what get from Dr. Blix and the media," he said, adding: "I respect the media, but it is not necessarily something which the Security Council can make a judgement about."
Mr Lavrov said US and British forces were welcome to search for banned weapons, but the council must have the final say on Iraq's disarmament.
Referring to council Resolution 1483, which lifted UN sanctions against Iraq on May 22, he said "there must be a process whereby we verify the absence of WMD in accordance with the disarmament resolutions."
AFP