IRAQ: Western warplanes bombed southern Iraq yesterday, in an attack Iraqi officials said killed four people at oil company offices but which the US military said was aimed at Iraqi air defences.
The strike came as UN arms experts conducted a fourth day of inspections, examining an agricultural facility previously linked to a biological weapons programme and military complexes associated with alleged nuclear programmes near Baghdad.
Residents of the southern port city of Basra claimed Western planes bombed administrative offices of the state-run Southern Oil Company on the outskirts of the city at around noon.
The company supervises part of Iraq's oil exports under the oil-for-food deal with the UN. An Iraqi military spokesman said four people died and 27 were wounded in the attack. An oil company official said the casualties were company employees and passers-by.
The military spokesman said the planes also attacked two other civilian targets in the south. He said Iraqi air defence units had fired on the planes. In a statement, the US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, said coalition aircraft had fired "precision-guided weapons" at Iraqi air defence facilities near Basra.
It said the incident in the southern no-fly zone occurred "after Iraqi forces fired anti-aircraft artillery at coalition aircraft in the Northern No-Fly Zone".
"Coalition aircraft never target civilian populations or infrastructure and go to painstaking lengths to avoid injury to civilians and damage to civilian facilities," it added.
A team of UN experts searching for weapons of mass destruction drove to an airstrip for helicopters used in spraying pesticides on crops. The facility at Khan Bani Saad, some 30 km north-east of the Iraqi capital, is run by the Agriculture Ministry.
Muntazer Mohammad, head of the centre, said the inspectors checked seals on equipment locked away by previous inspection teams. He said the experts copied the contents of the facility's computer and took swabs from water tanks.
A statement from the inspectors in Baghdad said Iraq had declared the site to have been used for the development of biological weapons in 1988.
A second inspection team went to Ibn Firnas military industrial compound at Rashidiya, 20 km north-east of Baghdad. The compound is run by the Military Industrialisation Commission.
After spending around two hours there, inspectors left and went into a nearby facility, run by the Commission's al-Quds Company. Ibn Firnas chief Ibrahim Hussein said the plant produced spare parts for fighter jets and helicopters. He denied any links to banned weapons and said his staff had co-operated fully with the inspectors.
International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed El Baradei told the BBC yesterday that UN inspectors in Iraq had as yet found no evidence of nuclear arms. He said: "We are off to a good start but we are far from being able to reach a conclusion." Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix was reported yesterday as saying his team had encountered no "impediments". - (Reuters)