PARIS, Jan 13: UN arms inspectors need “a few months” to determine whether Iraq is harbouring a secret weapons programme, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said here on Monday.

“We still need a few months to achieve our mission,” ElBaradei said at a press conference following talks with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

“We need to give inspection a chance to run its full course,” he added.

ElBaradei and UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix are to brief the UN Security Council on Jan 27 on their progress since experts from the IAEA and Blix’s UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) returned to Iraq two months ago.

ElBaradei said Iraq had yet to fully cooperate with the international effort to ensure Baghdad is not stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

“What we see is passive cooperation and what we want to see is more active cooperation” from Iraq, ElBaradei said. “Inspection should and could work if Iraq were to provide the full cooperation required.”

ElBaradei defined “active cooperation” as handing over documents, conducting interviews with Iraqi scientists and concrete evidence that Iraq had destroyed its weapons.

The IAEA chief said he could not set a specific date for the conclusion of inspections, and tried to minimize the significance of the Jan 27 meeting, saying he and Blix would deliver a “status report”, and that Jan 27 was not a “cutoff date”.—AFP