IRAQ Inspectors give no notice in microbe-sprayer search

COMBINED DISPATCHES
KHAN BANI SA'AD, Iraq -- Caught by surprise, the director of an airfield north of Baghdad was not even at the base when U.N. weapons inspectors arrived.
Montadhar Radeef Mohammed was further surprised Sunday when he was kept outside until the inspectors gave him permission to enter the base they were searching for devices that can spray deadly microbes from the air.
"I was surprised because I wasn't here," Mohammed said. "I was also surprised that they didn't allow me to enter until they got permission. I wasn't aware of the visit." The inspectors have routinely sealed sites during their searches.
"We are not giving any notice whatsoever and we insist to exercise our full rights," the top nuclear inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the British Broadcasting Corp.
"And we intend to have it all the way in that fashion," ElBaradei added on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."
Devices
In the late 1980s, according to U.N. arms experts, military researchers at the Khan Bani Sa'ad airfield tested the Zubaidy device, a helicopter-mounted contraption that could disperse deadly bacteriological agents from the air.
U.N. inspectors who scoured Iraq in the 1990s for weapons of mass destruction believe a dozen Zubaidy devices were built.
But unlike thousands of other pieces of equipment affiliated with Iraq's programs to develop banned arms, the spraying units never were confirmed to have been destroyed. The inspectors wrote in their last report that "the final, tested devices were unaccounted for."
Five-hour search
Inspectors spent almost five hours at the site, walking inside three large camouflage-painted hangars and looking at a collection of rusty Soviet-made helicopters, chemical tanks and spraying nozzles scattered on the tarmac.
The airfield's director said the inspectors also took samples from inside the tanks and downloaded files from computers in his office.
"We have only civilian functions," Mohammed said. "These systems are for plants."
He said the inspectors found no prohibited material during their search. The inspectors, who have completed four days of searches, did not comment about the visit here.
They have said they will reveal their conclusions only to their superiors in New York and Vienna, who in turn must report to the U.N. Security Council.
Warplanes bomb site
As the inspectors searched the airfield, Iraqi officials said, Western warplanes bombed an oil company office building in the southern port city of Basra, killing four people and wounding 27 others. An Iraqi military spokesman said two rockets hit the offices of the Southern Oil Co. on Sunday morning.
The company supervises the country's oil exports under a U.N. program that allows Iraq to sell oil for food and humanitarian supplies.
U.S. officials confirmed an attack occurred, but they said U.S. and British planes, which police "no-fly" zones in southern and northern Iraq, hit air-defense facilities near Basra in response to Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery fire.
Iraqi officials did not say who fired first. An Iraqi military spokesman said coalition planes staged 62 "armed sorties" over southern Iraq Sunday morning.
"Iraqi missile batteries and ground defenses confronted the warplanes, forcing them to flee to their bases in Kuwait," the spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Iraqi News Agency.
U.S. officials have accused Iraq of placing air-defense installations and radar equipment close to civilian installations.
'Stretch Scuds'
Early today, a U.N. inspection team went to a Baghdad factory that made guidance and control systems for Iraq's "stretch Scuds," Soviet-made missiles that the Iraqis modified to longer range and used in the Gulf War.
Such long-range missiles -- 400 miles -- are now prohibited for Iraq, and the inspectors presumably want to ensure that work has not resumed.
Iraqi Information Ministry officials said a second team of inspectors visited an alcohol plant on Baghdad's outskirts. The purpose of the inspection could not be immediately determined. Alcohol is a component of many chemical weapons.
British accusation
In London today, the British government accused Baghdad of systematic human rights abuses, charging in a report that Saddam Hussein's regime has oppressed ordinary Iraqis through torture, rape and terror.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the report's aim was "to remind the world that the abuses of the Iraqi regime extend far beyond its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in violation of its international obligations."
Amnesty International, however, accused Straw of a "cold and calculated manipulation" of the human rights situation to support its case for a possible war in Iraq.