VIENNA, Oct 14: The removal of Iraq's mothballed nuclear facilities took around one year and was carried out by experts with heavy machinery and demolition equipment, diplomats close to the UN said on Thursday.

The UN nuclear watchdog, which monitored Saddam Hussein's nuclear sites before last year's Iraq war, informed the UN Security Council this week that equipment and materials that could be used to make atomic weapons have been vanishing from Iraq but neither Baghdad nor Washington had noticed.

"This process carried on at least through 2003...and probably into 2004, at least in early 2004," a Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said.

American, British and Iraqi officials have downplayed the disappearance of the equipment, saying that it was part of the widespread looting that flared up after the March 2003 invasion, which the United States and Britain said was to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. Both countries now admit Saddam had no caches of banned weapons.

But several diplomats close to the IAEA said that this was not the result of haphazard looting. They said the removal of this dual-use equipment - which prior to the war was tagged and closely monitored by the IAEA to ensure that it was not being used in a weapons programme - was planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing.

"We're talking about dozens of sites being dismantled," a diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "Large numbers of buildings taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you'd do overnight."

Diplomats in Vienna say the IAEA is worried that these facilities, which belonged to Saddam's pre-1991 covert nuclear weapons programme, could have been packed up and sold to a country or militants interested in nuclear weapons.

The diplomats said that among the sites that had been stripped were a precision manufacturing site at Umm Al Marik, a site connected with Iraq's nuclear weapons activities at Al Qa Qaa and an engineering facility at Badr.

One diplomat said there were "dozens of others" that gradually disappeared from satellite photos analysed by IAEA experts at its headquarters in Vienna. In 1991, the IAEA detected Saddam's clandestine nuclear weapons programme and spent the next seven years investigating and dismantling it.

By the time UN inspectors fled the country in December 1998, Iraq's covert atom bomb programme was gone. After returning in November 2002 until they were evacuated in March 2003, the IAEA was confident none of the dual-use nuclear equipment in Iraq was being used in a weapons programme. -Reuters