Arms inspection chief accused of stalling on Iraq's elusive WMDs

4.00pm - By RAYMOND WHITAKER

The new head of British and American arms inspectors in Iraq has come under fire for refusing to acknowledge that the hunt for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction has virtually ground to a halt.

After his first progress report to the US Congress last week, critics accused Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), of stalling for time until the presidential election in November is out of the way. "One ISG member told me that since last year the inspectors have been kept in Iraq to save political face rather than to find weapons," said Dr Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University expert on the WMD issue.

Tony Blair and George Bush have all but admitted that the WMD claims which were used to justify war in Iraq were exaggerated or wrong, and have launched inquiries to determine whether there were failures by their intelligence services.

Secretary of State Colin Powell also admitted this weekend that the "most dramatic" claim in his speech to the UN Security Council weeks before the war -- that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories -- appeared to have been based on faulty information.

One of the main reasons the US and Britain have been forced to climb down was the stark announcement by Mr Duelfer's predecessor, David Kay, who quit in December, that there were no illicit weapons to be found. But in his little-noticed progress report, Mr Duelfer ignored the views of Mr Kay, stating that "the ISG continues to look for weapons of mass destruction".

He stressed that the WMD search was difficult and time-consuming. "We regularly receive reports, some quite intriguing and credible, about concealed caches [of weapons]," Mr Duelfer insisted, adding that the ISG continued to visit suspect sites in Iraq, despite the dangers. Several inspection teams have been attacked, but so far there has been no loss of life.

Dr Rangwala, who has visited Iraq to study the work of the ISG, called the report misleading. "Shortly before he quit, Mr Kay cut back site visits," he said. "The inspectors have virtually given up looking for WMD on the ground." The focus of their work has shifted instead to interviewing Iraqi scientists and examining millions of documents held at the ISG's "analytical centre" in Qatar, but Mr Duelfer said neither task was going well.

Pointing out that he only arrived in Iraq just over six weeks ago, the chief inspector warned: "At this point in time I cannot say how long this investigation should take." But he deplored the "extreme reluctance of Iraqi managers, scientists and engineers to "speak freely", and reported: "While the ISG has met with hundreds of scientists, we have yet to identify the most critical people in any programmatic effort."

Millions of documents were collected, he added, but pointed out they were "often mixed up in such a way as to make research ... extremely difficult".

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq