U.N. inspectors on Sunday visited a missile plant south of Baghdad. The site was one of three the inspection team visited, according to a statement from the inspectors' Baghdad headquarters.
With the arrival of 15 additional inspectors, the total now stands at 113. Hiro Ueki, a spokesman for the U.N. program in Baghdad, said Saturday was the busiest in terms of sites visited since the teams returned to Iraq on Nov. 27 after a four-year hiatus.
According to AP, the sites visited Sunday included Al Mutasim, a government missile plant occupying the grounds of a former nuclear facility 70 kilometers south of Baghdad, the inspectors said.
Al-Mutasim was cited in a CIA intelligence report released in October detailing what U.S. officials said was evidence Iraq was producing chemical and biological weapons as well as seeking nuclear weapons. The CIA report said the scale of some of the work at Al-Mutasim suggested Iraq would work on prohibited weapons there.
Also Sunday, the inspectors returned to a missile complex north of Baghdad that they had examined a day earlier. The missile complex, the government-owned al-Nasr company, 46 kilometers north of Baghdad, also houses sophisticated machine tools that can be used to manufacture gas centrifuges.
Also Sunday, International Atomic Energy Agency experts on the U.N. team inspected Um-Al Maarek — Mother of Battles — a government facility some 20 kilometers south of Baghdad. (Albawaba.com)
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