US arms hunter confident of finding 'remarkable things'

11.45am

WASHINGTON - Though no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have yet been found, Washington's chief inspector David Kay said on Sunday he was confident the search would turn up "remarkable things" in the coming months.

In a series of television interviews, the CIA special adviser and head of the Iraqi Survey Group said much had been overlooked by the media in an interim report presented last week, in which he said no actual weapons had been discovered.

Kay stressed the report concluded that Iraq had a vast secret network of laboratories, including some two dozen hidden in the Iraqi intelligence service and operated while UN inspectors were still in the country.

President George W Bush justified his decision to invade Iraq largely on his belief that President Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and was developing a nuclear bomb, and was thus an imminent threat to the United states.

Kay's report disappointed many politicians in Washington, including some in Bush's own Republican Party, who are concerned that US intelligence may have been exaggerated in the drive to oust Saddam.

Kay was sent to Iraq this summer to co-ordinate efforts to find the weapons. He told US lawmakers on Thursday none had yet been found but has since said other, important elements of his report were ignored.

He said on Sunday an Iraqi scientist had come forward with 97 vials, one of which contained an active biological toxin, and his team was now searching for another reported cache of vials possibly containing anthrax.

An active effort to buy long-range missiles, including from North Korea, was also turned up, Kay said, as well as the manufacture in as late as 2002 of fuel for Scud missiles which Iraq used in the first Gulf war and which it told United Nations weapons inspectors it had destroyed.

"What everyone has skated over, both in the chemical and the biological area, is what we indeed have found. We found a vast network of undeclared labs engaged in prohibited activity in both of those areas," Kay told CNN.

"So it's not that we have found nothing. ... We have actually found quite a bit although we have not yet found shiny pointy things that I would call a weapon."

Kay told ABC: "We're inside the country. I know in that country we're going to find remarkable things about their weapons programme."

Kay said the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons would take another six to nine months as his 1300 inspectors work on many fronts, including the examination of 130 conventional ammunition storage depots that contained some 650,000 tons of arms. He said there were 26 such sites considered critical because chemical munitions might be there.

"We're going through them, but it is a tough go," he told ABC.

On the biological weapons front, he told the Fox News programme: "Based on information leads, we have no reason to believe that we will not find more. But we're searching still."

He said the team was still investigating how far Saddam had progressed in a "very nascent start up" of a nuclear weapons programme, having so far found that money and rudimentary experiments were taking place as late as 2000.

Kay said information had come from many sources, including Iraq's former deputy prime minister, Tareq Aziz, who surrendered to US forces in April.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq