BAGHDAD, Jan 9: Iraq revealed on Thursday it had written to UN disarmament chiefs to protest the “dubious character” of some of the questions being asked by arms inspectors before President Saddam Hussein accused them of spying.

“We have written to them on January 5,” the day before Saddam’s broadside against the disarmament mission in an Armed Forces Day speech, said Iraq’s chief liaison official with the inspectors, General Hossam Mohammad Amin.

“I gave examples of where questions were irrelevant to their work,” Amin told a news conference.

“We shall be discussing this with (UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) chief Hans Blix,” who is due in Baghdad next week.

Amin complained that during a Dec 25 visit to a munitions stores, an inspection team had asked about troop numbers, store movements and air defences, and requested a groundplan.

During a Jan 4 visit to an airbase, they had asked about the chain of command and telephone number of the base and “all kinds of intrusive questions which have no relevance to the work of the inspectors.”

On a Jan 7 visit to Mosul University College of Education they had asked “irrelevant” questions about Internet connections.

And during a visit the same day to the Bakir airbase, 100 kilometres north of Baghdad, they had asked whether there were daily fighter flights from the base.

“All these questions have a suspicious nature and we can call it spying as it has nothing to do with the search for weapons of mass destruction.”

In his Armed Forces Day speech Monday, the Iraqi president accused the UN inspectors of engaging in “sheer intelligence activity”, in a sharp downturn in the tone of Iraq’s official rhetoric towards the disarament mission.

“Instead of searching for so-called weapons of mass destruction in order to expose the lies of the liars, the inspection teams have been compiling lists of Iraqi scientists, asking questions with undeclared purposes, and inquiring about army camps and non-prohibited armament,” he said.

“All this, or at least most of it, is sheer intelligence activity,” said Saddam, who reiterated his charges on Tuesday.

Iraqi scientists: United Nations weapons inspectors plan to ask Iraqi scientists to leave Iraq soon to be interviewed in Cyprus about prohibited weapons, Time Magazine has reported on its Web site.

Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix said on Thursday his teams would interview scientists within a week or so to get more information. But he did not say whether the Iraqis would be taken out of the country, as the United States wants.

“This remains one of the options and I’m sure we will begin some interviews very soon, within a week or so,” Blix said.

“There are several options on how you conduct the interviews that the Security Council has given us and we will make use of what is appropriate in each case.”

Time Magazine said the east Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which is already the forwarding base for weapons inspectors, would be the venue for the interviews.

“The...inspection team plans to begin that process within days, when they will begin inviting an undisclosed number of Iraqi scientists to leave Iraq and be interviewed in Cyprus,” the report on its Web site, www.time.com, said.

Cyprus said it would consider any U.N. request to host interviews, but that none had been made so far.

Foreign Minister Ioannis Cassoulides said: “Our position is in principle that we always co-operate with the U.N. We will view any request from them within that spirit.”

The weapons inspectors have rented hotel space in Cyprus’s coastal town of Larnaca, within walking distance of the airport where a U.N. aircraft conducts weekly shuttles to Baghdad.

If Cyprus is eventually selected, there are suitable facilities to host scientists and their families. The well-guarded premises of an abandoned airport in the capital is a neutral U.N. protected area.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 allows for the inspectors to interview scientists outside Iraq and requires Baghdad to give unimpeded access to individuals sought for interviews without Iraqi government officials present.

US officials said last month Washington was offering to set up what amounts to a witness protection programme for defecting Iraqi scientists and their families.

Iraq accused the United States last month of trying to tempt the scientists to leave Iraq and lure them into giving false information in return for financial gain.—AFP/Reuters