The United Nations nuclear watchdog agency said last night it had asked the United States to let it send a mission to Iraq to investigate reports of looting at the country's nuclear facilities.
The spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said IAEA chief Mr Mohamed El Baradei had written to the United States with a request to send a mission to Iraq . . . to investigate the state of the facilities there".
"We have not yet received a response," the spokeswoman said. She added that the letter was dated April 29th, nearly a week ago. "We have been assured by the US that they would secure these facilities, but the agency finds these reports [of looting] disturbing".
In Moscow, visiting US Undersecretary of State Mr John Bolton said Washington saw no immediate role for the UN in its quest for weapons of mass destruction.
But he did not specifically mention the latest IAEA request to inspect nuclear facilities.Last month the IAEA asked the US to secure Iraq's nuclear facilities to protect them from looters in the post-war chaos. Washington assured the UN it would prevent the removal of material from these sites.
But on Sunday the Washington Postreported that sites housing large amounts of highly radioactive material appeared to have been looted and that it was impossible to say whether nuclear materials were missing.
The IAEA, whose nuclear weapons inspectors returned to Baghdad last November after a four-year hiatus, has a detailed inventory of radioactive materials stored at the Tuwaitha nuclear research facility and other sites in the country that may have been looted.