BAGHDAD, Nov 28: UN arms experts turned their sights on Thursday to two facilities suspected by Washington of having been rehabilitated and used to produce biological weapons.

On the second day of inspections after a break of nearly four years, a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) combed the Al-Nasser factory, 25 kilometres north of the Iraqi capital.

The factory, which belongs to the industry ministry and which Iraqi officials say produces mechanical equipment, is located within the huge Al-Taji compound.

Iraq’s Trade Minister Mohammad Mahdi Saleh explained to journalists taken to Al-Taji in an on-site inspection in August that the facility in question was in fact a warehouse used by his ministry to stock foodstuffs.

According to Saleh, the trucks photographed by a US satellite had been loaded at the warehouse with “children’s milk and food”, which was then transported to distribution centres throughout Iraq.

In June 1991, UN weapons inspectors destroyed 62 Iraqi missiles, 32 warheads and 10 launchers at Al-Taji, a site they described as so massive it was more like a town than a camp.

And in Aug 1995, Al-Taji was listed as a single cell protein production project from which five fermenters had been moved to another site and used to make large quantities of botulinum and anthrax between 1989 and 1990.

Inspectors from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) also visited a former vaccines laboratory in Al-Dura, some 30 kilometres south of Baghdad, which was closed down in 1996 by its disbanded predecessor, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM).—AFP