UN inspectors scrutinised more suspected weapons sites today as an Iraqi daily denounced a US pact to upgrade military bases in Qatar as part of a paranoid American quest for global hegemony.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who signed the deal with the tiny Gulf state yesterday, said there was no question that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The issue, he told CNN in an interview in the Qatari capital Doha, was whether Baghdad had accepted that "the game is up" and would disarm in line with a tough UN resolution.
UN experts, absent for four years, have been working flat out since they resumed inspections in Iraq on November 27th to check Baghdad's assertion that it has no banned weapons.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) combed at least six sites today.
Among them was a factory in a Baghdad suburb that previous UN inspectors listed as producing modified Scud missiles.
Destroyed in a 1993 US cruise missile attack and bombed again in 1998, Al-Nidaa Public Company now makes metal moulds, not missiles, according to its director, Mr Khalil al-Nuaimi.
General Hussam Mohammed Amin, the chief Iraqi official who liaises with the inspectors, told a news conference that Iraq had had "no Scud missiles, zero Scuds" since summer 1991.
Mr Amin, head of the National Monitoring Directorate, praised the professionalism of the UN experts, noting that they had refrained from carrying out inspections during the two-day religious holiday ending the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
His comments contrasted with remarks by Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan who last week accused the inspectors of spying for Israel and the United States.