Inspectors find monitoring equipment 'missing' at Iraqi site

The first hiccup in the UN weapons inspections in Iraq occurred yesterday when officials said that equipment and monitoring cameras had gone missing from a missile site in Baghdad.

The disclosure came as George Bush stepped up the pressure on Saddam Hussein, saying that the results of the first week of United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq were "not encouraging" and warning that any deceptions in the inventory expected from Baghdad by 8 December would lead to war.

Iraqi officials told the inspectors during a six-hour surprise visit to the al-Karama factory in Baghdad that the missing gear had either been destroyed by Western bombing or moved to other facilities. The items had been there when previous UN inspectors made their last visit in 1998.

The inspection at the plant, where medium-range Scud missiles, banned under UN rules, used to be manufactured, plainly caught the Iraqis off guard. The onus is now on them to show conclusively what happened to the equipment, which had been placed under long-term monitoring by the UN inspectors.

Mr Bush declared in a speech at the Pentagon yesterday that Washington would judge the Iraqis by evidence of a change in their leader's behaviour. "Has he decided to co-operate willingly and comply completely, or has he not? So far the signs are not encouraging," the President said.

The first big deadline in the inspections process is 8 December, when Iraq must deliver a full inventory of its proscribed chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programmes, under the terms of last month's UN resolution. "That declaration must be credible and complete," Mr Bush said, or President Saddam would have shown that he had not changed his ways. And in the latter case, Mr Bush said, war would follow. A "peace of denial" would only invite greater perils later. "America will confront gathering dangers early before our options become limited and desperate," he said.

The White House added that Mr Bush himself would not review the statement provided by Baghdad. Officials warn that immediate action against President Saddam is unlikely. Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush's spokesman, said: "Saddam Hussein will have to figure out how long the US is prepared to go along until we find out what he is really doing."

Another team of inspectors in Iraq spent hours yesterday examining al-Barak, al-Awali and al-Dahab ­ "Tower", "Heights" and "Gold" are all brands of the local spirit arak ­ on their crucial mission to check on President Saddam's alleged mass destruction arsenal. The UN would not reveal the purpose of the raid on the distillery. One theory was that the alcohol was a component of a chemical used for defence, another that it could be used as a combustible for missiles.

The UN team left its headquarters at the Canal Hotel in their four-wheel-drives at 80 miles an hour with dozens of media vehicles in pursuit. They narrowly avoided passing traffic in the fog and then, in a now familiar ritual, got lost. Eventually, the convoy stopped and the monitors had to ask their Iraqi military minders the way to the sites, which were meant to be secret targets to be visited without warning.

One of the reasons for the teams from Unmovic (the UN Monitoring and Verification Commission) and IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency) regularly losing their bearings appears to be that the only maps of Baghdad they have, given to them by the US, are out of date. The street plans have been drastically altered by American bombing.

Iraqi officials insisted they had no idea why the distillery was searched. One said: "We are checking our stocks to see how much of the stuff they had taken away for analysis. We have got nothing against them taking it of course. After all, we don't want to be in material breach of the UN resolution."