BAGHDAD, Dec 22: The United States started sharing sensitive intelligence with UN inspectors hunting for Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction as war preparations gathered pace on Sunday.

UN experts were deployed across Iraq on the 23rd day of inspections as Washington gave the United Nations data on the locations of weapons factories and stores that Baghdad says do not exist.

“That process has started,” a US government official said.

Chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix told the BBC that “the most important thing that governments like the US or the UK could give us would be to tell us the sites where they are convinced that they (the Iraqis) keep some weapons of mass destruction. This is what we want to have.”

The New York Times said Washington was sharing state-of-the-art satellite imagery of sites at which US intelligence believes Iraq has been developing chemical and biological weapons.

Washington had been wary of sharing the information because weapons inspections in Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Gulf war were plagued with information leaks, from which Washington has said Iraq could have benefited.—AFP