US plane shot down as Iraqis heighten tension

Tensions in the Gulf increased yesterday after an Iraqi fighter plane penetrated the no-fly zone over the southern tier of the country and shot down an American unmanned surveillance drone.

The attack, the first downing of a US aircraft since the United Nations adopted a resolution giving Baghdad its last chance to disarm, was confirmed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, Richard Myers. "They got a lucky shot today, and they brought down the Predator," he said.

An Iraqi spokesman said: "With God's help, and with the will of the men of our heroic air defence forces and brave sky eagles, it was shot down in a delicate and planned operation."

A spokesman for the US Central Command said: "This action is the latest chapter in a lengthy list of hostile acts by the Iraqi regime." He added: "This is the first aircraft that we've had that's been shot down in the no-fly zone" since the UN Security Council authorised new inspections on 8 November. There have been at least 30 attacks by Iraq since then. The no-fly zones over Iraq, set up after the 1991 Gulf War, are patrolled by Britain and America.

In May, Iraq said it had forced an unmanned reconnaissance plane to land and in October 2001 it boasted of shooting down a Predator. Yesterday's incident caused alarm because most Iraqi attacks on American and British jets come from surface-to-air missiles rather than fighter aircraft.

General Myers was careful not to describe the incident as necessarily ratcheting up the Iraqi crisis or pushing Washington any closer to declaring war on Iraq. "I do not see it as an escalation," he said. The $3.7m (£2.3m) drone was reportedly on a routine reconnaissance mission.

As UN inspectors fanned out across Iraq again in the search for weapons of mass destruction, Mohammed al-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, spoke for the first time of starting one-on-one interviews with Iraqi scientists.

He said: "We are now, I think, in the process of interviewing people inside Iraq in private ... but we are also working on the practical arrangements to take people out of Iraq." He indicated that the interviews were preliminary and they were still identifying potential interviewees and weighing the risks of taking them from Iraq for debriefing.

"We have first, however, to identify those who are willing to co-operate with us, those who have critical information," Mr Baradei said. "We need to be concerned about their safety, either providing them asylum, or if they decide to go back that their safety and their families are secure."

Washington is pushing hard for inspectors to focus on identifying scientists who may have information to trip up President Saddam, who insists that Iraq is free of banned weapons. New York sources said that Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector, was still some way from starting that.

UN inspectors swooped yesterday on three sites near Baghdad, including one that Iraq says is a baby milk factory bombed during the 1991 Gulf War as the alleged site of a biological weapons factory.