No evidence of banned arms, Blix to tell UN

Hans Blix, the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, will tell the Security Council today that there are significant omissions in Iraq's declaration about weapons of mass destruction. But he is unlikely to reveal a "smoking gun" sufficient to trigger an early war.

There is still nothing to indicate that the inspectors deployed in Iraq by Mr Blix and his counterpart at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed al-Baradei, have found any evidence to back claims by Washington and London that Iraq is hiding lethal weapons.

Both men are due to travel to Baghdad next week to meet Iraqi officials and to review the progress of the inspections. While there, they will press the regime to explain what appear to be important omissions in the 1,200-page Iraqi declaration, submitted one month ago.

Iraq, for instance, failed to reveal the whereabouts of stocks of biological agents, such as anthrax, and the nutrients used to grow them. Mr Blix wants to know more about 50 conventional warheads that Iraq claims it has destroyed, as well as 550 mustard gas shells declared lost after the 1991 Gulf War. But Iraq did hand to the UN inspectors in late November the so-called "Air Force document". The file, which was snatched from previous teams of inspectors in 1998, seems to show that Iraq used 6,000 fewer chemical bombs in its 1980-88 war with Iran than had been suggested.

Doubts appear to be increasing at the UN about the likelihood of an imminent start to hostilities. While offering little help on clarifying the gaps in its declaration, Iraq is on the whole working hard not to impede the inspectors.

"Realistically, it is not going to be easy to see in the next two months that we will be able to say that Iraq is not co-operating," one diplomat observed. This suggests that Washington may have to put aside its preference for military action in February and March before hotter weather begins to set in.

Sources are beginning to play down the significance of 27 January, the day on which Mr Blix will present to the Security Council his first comprehensive review of his inspections. "I don't think that that will be a make-or-break date," a Security Council source said.

A spokesman for Mr Blix said: "Inspections are a process and one cannot necessarily draw conclusions from simply looking at a site. Samples have to be taken, and analysed. Something that raises a question one day may be resolved in an inspection the next."