BAGHDAD, Jan 11: A group of French activists opposed to any US-led attack on Iraq have arrived in Baghdad to monitor UN arms inspections and ensure they are not being manipulated, team leader Gilles Munier said on Saturday.

“We have come to show the Iraqi people that three out of four French citizens are opposed to a war and also that the French people are prepared to act on the ground,” Munier said.

An opinion poll published in the French newspaper Le Figaro on Thursday showed that 77 percent of French people did not support a military strike against the government of President Saddam Hussein.

Munier, secretary general of the French-Iraqi Friendship Association, said the 12-strong group, which arrived here on Friday and includes three former military personnel and two scientists, would spend a week in Iraq.

The group will monitor the work of inspectors seeking to determine if Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction, going to sites where problems arise.

“We will be there in case a problem arises, and to prevent a crisis breaking out on the basis of allegations made by two or three persons. We will be a sort of counter-inspectors,” Munier said.

Should the inspectors, or Washington or London, say that a site has been found to house prohibited material, the group would go to the site concerned and demand that “an independent, adequately equipped team be dispatched within three to four days”, he said.

Munier noted that former senior weapons inspector Scott Ritter had come up with the idea of forming a body of “independent inspectors”.

Ritter, who was a member of the former disarmament commission, UNSCOM, turned into a critic of its activities and is currently lobbying against a US invasion of Iraq, which Washington is threatening to launch in a bid to topple Saddam.

Munier said teams of “counter-inspectors” would be successively dispatched so as to ensure a “permanent presence on the ground”.

The French-Iraqi Friendship Association lobbies for a lifting of UN sanctions imposed on Iraq since 1990 and which have badly hit the Iraqi population.—AFP