Tensions at UN over Iraq dossier

Of the 15 Security Council members, only the United States has so far commented officially on the 12,000-page Iraqi declaration handed over on 7 December.

"We approached it with scepticism and the information I have received so far is that that scepticism is well-founded," US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Monday.

The United States and Britain have signalled that they are ready for war if Iraq is found to be in "material breach" of the tough new UN Security Council resolution adopted on 8 November.

Censorship

The other permanent members - China, France and Russia - are now studying the document.

" We'll withhold making a final judgment or final statement until we have completed our analysis, completed our discussions with Unmovic and IAEA "
Colin Powell

They received uncensored copies of the dossier, but the non-permanent members will receive only edited versions - minus sensitive information that could be used to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Russia indicated on Tuesday that it would wait to hear from UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, before deciding how far Iraq is complying with UN resolutions.

"It is not for Russia or for anybody else to make any judgments until we hear from Unmovic and the IAEA," Russia's UN Ambassador Sergey Lavrov said.

Mr Blix and IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei are due to brief the UN Security Council on the dossier on Thursday.

Norway and Syria have voiced irritation over the way the United States took charge of the weapons dossier after Iraq handed it over.

US administration officials have dismissed the document, saying it is woefully short of facts.

President Bush could announce the formal US response in a few days' time, White House officials have said.

The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says one of the problems America is expected to highlight is Iraq's failure to account for chemical and biological agents it still possessed when the last inspectors left in 1998.

New inspections

At least six groups of UN inspectors visited Iraqi facilities on Tuesday.

One team returned to the University of Baghdad, investigating the plasma institute, the French news agency AFP reported.

Ballistics teams returned to the Zat al-Sawary fibreglass plant north of Baghdad, owned by the Iraqi Military Industrialisation Corporation.

Meanwhile, the first samples collected by inspectors in Iraq have arrived at an IAEA laboratory in Austria, where they will be analysed for any traces of a nuclear weapons programme.

An initial analysis of the eight samples will take two to three weeks, an IAEA spokesman told the Associated Press news agency. Another 20 samples are expected by the weekend.

The IAEA has said it hopes to have screening results from the first samples by the time Mr El Baradei reports to the UN Security Council on 27 January.