The United Nations has pressed Baghdad for a list of scientists linked to arms programmes, as fractious Iraqi opposition groups met in London today to plan roles in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
UN experts, testing Iraq's assertion that it no longer has any banned weapons, pounced on 11 chemical, biological, nuclear and missile sites today, Iraqi officials said.
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Mr Tareq Aziz said the Arab world should know that the United States and Israel were making a fuss over weapons to mask their determination to destroy Iraq.
Chief UN weapons inspector Mr Hans Blix has written to Iraqi presidential adviser Mr Amir al-Saadi asking Iraq to name its arms scientists by the end of December, Mr Blix's spokesman said on Friday. An Iraqi official has said the list is in the works.
Under Security Council resolution 1441 of November 8th, the inspectors have the right to interview in private anyone who might know details of Iraq's weapons programmes, if necessary by taking them and their families out of the country.
The United States wants Mr Blix and his counterpart at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr Mohamed ElBaradei, to do just that. But some diplomats believe Washington is pushing the issue to provoke a clash between Baghdad and the UN arms experts that could provide a quick pretext for a war on Iraq.
"We are not going to abduct anybody, and we're not serving as a defection agency," Mr Blix said last week. Washington says it will topple Saddam and disarm Iraq by force if it fails to disarm voluntarily. But Mr Aziz, opening a poetry festival in Baghdad, challenged the idea that disarmament was the real issue.
"The Arab nation should not be deceived by false excuses by America and Zionist imperialism (Israel) that they are launching their aggression on Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction," he said.
"The United States and its ally Israel are using all their means of deception to destroy Iraq."
Meanwhile, Iraqi opposition leaders called for a "democratic, pluralistic and federal" Iraq at the opening of a two-day conference today designed to map out a common strategy in anticipation of a US-led regime change in Baghdad.
Speakers portrayed the meeting of more than 300 dissidents as proof that the Iraqi opposition, long dismissed by critics as a disparate collection of bickering factions, was capable of overcoming differences in pursuit of its goal of removing President Saddam Hussein.
But they also recognized that they did not speak for the entire opposition, part of which has shunned the gathering.
Weapons inspectors, who returned to Iraq last month after a four-year absence, spread their net wide today, sifting through 11 sites suspected of involvement in banned weaponry.
They returned to the Communicable Diseases Control Centre in Baghdad, after failing to gain access to some locked rooms there during an inspection yesterday, the Muslim day of rest.
Senior UN and Iraqi officials used their hotline for the first time since the latest round of inspections began to sort out the snag, agreeing to seal the rooms temporarily.
Another UN team spent over two hours inside an unmarked walled compound in the Baghdad residential area of al-Amiriya, which turned out to house a missile research project.