WASHINGTON, June 10: US President George Bush delivered Syria a fresh warning on Friday, calling for Damascus to pull its intelligence services out of Lebanon.

Mr Bush said he was ‘disturbed’ by reports of Syrian intelligence personnel in Lebanon.

“Our message to Syria — and it’s not just the message of the United States, the United nations has said the same thing — is that in order for Lebanon to be free, Syria needs to ‘not only remove their military, but to remove intelligence officers as well.”

UN TEAM: 1Secretary-General Kofi Annan has decided to send a UN verification team back to Lebanon to see if Syrian intelligence agents are still in the country, UN officials and diplomats said on Friday.

No date for the mission has been set, spokesman Fred Eckhard said. A UN verification team reported on May 23 that Syria had withdrawn its soldiers, but said there was no way to determine if plainclothes agents were still in the country.

—Reuters