Found papers point to failed nuclear fuel effort

LARNACA, Cyprus -- An Iraqi scientist confirmed Saturday that documents found at his home outlined high-tech attempts to enrich uranium in the 1980s but said the information was from an experimental program that was declared a decade ago.

Senior experts in the U.N. agency have said the enrichment method -- which could be used to make nuclear weapons -- proved too sophisticated for the Iraqis to exploit at the time.

U.N. nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who oversees the U.N. review of Iraq's nuclear program, said the research outlined in the documents had "something to do with laser enrichment."

U.N. officials have said Iraq's attempt at "laser isotope separation," begun in the 1970s, was a failure and was largely abandoned by 1987 in favor of more promising approaches to enriching uranium for nuclear bombs.

ElBaradei said the issue appeared to be more whether the Iraqis included the information found in the documents in the 12,000-page declaration they submitted to the United Nations last month.

"If it's something we did not know about, it obviously doesn't show the transparency we've been preaching," ElBaradei said.

The Iraqis claim the declaration proves that their country no longer owns or is developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Top U.N. inspectors say the documentation was incomplete and failed to support Baghdad's claims.

The documents were found Thursday by U.N. inspectors in the home of 55-year-old physicist Faleh Hassan -- once associated with his government's nuclear program -- as the inspectors paid their first unannounced calls on private homes in Iraq.

Hassan said Iraq canceled its laser enrichment research program in 1988 and he never worked on that project.

ElBaradei and Hans Blix, who heads the U.N. search for biological and chemical weapons, arrived in Larnaca on Saturday for an overnight stay. They were going to the Iraqi capital today for two days of meetings with the inspectors and Iraqi officials before reporting Jan. 27 to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's cooperation and the findings of the inspectors -- a briefing that could help tip the scale toward war or peace.

Blix and ElBaradei said Saturday that Baghdad needed to do more to convince the world it was not hiding anything.

"Iraq has not cooperated sufficiently with the United Nations weapons inspectors, and we will impress the seriousness of the situation to them," Blix said.

Also on Saturday, U.N. inspection teams visited at least five locations in Iraq, including Trade Ministry food warehouses in central Baghdad. The team examined at least two refrigerator trucks and a trailer, which the site manager, Nawal Nafa'a Fotohi, said were mobile food testing labs.

Such labs are of particular interest because U.S. intelligence officials believe Iraq may want to develop mobile "fermentation units" to manufacture biological weapons. U.N. officials had said inspectors would be looking for biological weapons laboratories on trucks.

Fotohi insisted the labs were used to make sure government food rations were safe. Inspectors would not say whether they found anything suspicious.

"We are not afraid of anything and we have nothing to hide," Fotohi said.

Saudis press for Iraqis to oust Hussein

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Increasingly desperate to avoid war, Saudi Arabia is engaged in a campaign to incite Iraqi security forces to overthrow Saddam Hussein if he continues to refuse to step down or go into exile, officials here say.

The Saudi leadership is advocating Hussein's removal as part of a war-avoidance strategy even as the kingdom signals Washington that it will cooperate extensively with a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf.

It seemed possible that a number of Arab and Muslim states could join the effort this week as Turkey seeks to assemble Iraq's neighbors for urgent discussions in Ankara, Turkey's capital, with an explicit agenda of averting military conflict, though a number of Saudi officials said they considered averting a conflict to be a remote possibility.

Turkey's prime minister, Abdullah Gul, said on Friday that he had encouraged Hussein to consider stepping down and, separately, a senior Saudi intelligence officer is said to be engaged in discussions with Hussein's son Qusay, on a proposal to offer amnesty to the Iraqi leader along with an exile home for members of his extended family.

Iraqi officials have denied that such talks are under way.

POLL: Most Americans want the United States to take more time seeking a peaceful solution in Iraq rather than moving quickly into a military confrontation, a new poll says. By 60 percent to 35 percent, people in the Newsweek poll released Saturday said they would prefer that the Bush administration allow more time to find an alternative to war.

Support for a military option would be strong, 81 percent, if the United States were to act with full allied support and the backing of the U.N. Security Council. A majority would be opposed should this country act without the support of the United Nations and had no more than one or two allies.

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