NEW YORK, June 12: The Bush administration has decided to place teams of American inspectors at major seaports in Muslim nations and other smaller, strategically located foreign ports to prevent terrorists from using cargo containers to smuggle chemical, biological or nuclear weapons into the United States, according to The New York Times quoting senior administration officials said.

The inspectors, the officials told the paper, will be provided with radiation monitors, chemical detectors and other equipment to inspect “high risk” metal cargo containers before they are placed on ships bound for the United States.

The move is the second phase in a government programme begun shortly after the Sept t11 terrorist attacks to station American customs inspectors overseas to work side by side with their foreign counterparts in searching for unconventional weapons. The first phase focused on 20 large container ports in Europe and Asia, none of them in countries with predominantly Muslim populations the paper said.

Administration officials told the paper that teams of American inspectors would be at work at almost all of those large ports a list that includes Antwerp, Genoa, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo and Yokohama” by the end of the year.

Officials told The Times that the Department of Homeland Security planned to place teams of inspectors that would remain indefinitely in Dubai, the Persian Gulf emirate that is a crucial transshipment point for containerized cargo in the Arab world; Malaysia; Turkey and other Muslim nations. Al Qaeda is believed to have a sizable presence in both Dubai and Malaysia.

Intelligence agencies report that Al Qaeda has repeatedly used cargo ships to move conventional weapons and explosives, including the explosives used in the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa.

Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner of customs and border protection in the Homeland Security Department, told the NYT that the expansion of the programme reflected a continuing concern that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups would try to place chemical, biological or nuclear weapons into some of the more than six million containers that arrive in the United States from overseas each year.

“I’m not prophesying anything,” Mr Bonner told the paper. “But I do have concern that we need to have this security system in place as fast as we possibly can.” He said: “the system of containerized shipping was vulnerable to terrorist exploitation.”

The issue of cargo security has become increasingly contentious on Capitol Hill. Many prominent lawmakers from coastal states have accused the administration of failing to provide the money to safeguard ports from terrorist attacks and to prevent terrorists from using cargo ships to transport weapons the paper said.