New York: American intelligence agencies have reached a preliminary conclusion that Iraq's 12,000-page declaration of its weapons programmes fails to account for chemical and biological agents missing when inspectors left Iraq four years ago, American officials and United Nations diplomats were quoted as saying on December 13.

In addition, Iraq's dossier leaves open a host of questions, like why Baghdad was seeking to buy uranium in Africa as also high technology materials that the US and Britain said were destined for a programme to enrich uranium.

The Iraqi document is under review both in Washington and at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

The omissions themselves pose a new challenge for the Bush administration, as it has to decide whether to declare that Iraq has failed to meet important requirements set by UN and whether to use that failure as a justification for war.

"What's remarkable is how little new there is, and how little effort there was to try to explain gaps that everyone knew were there since UNSCOM left," one American official who has access to the Iraqi declaration said, referring to the UN agency that conducted weapons inspections in Iraq through 1998.

A UN diplomat familiar with Iraq's submission said, "Our preliminary assessment is that much of the declaration seems to be recycled. They are claiming they have no new weapons of mass destruction."

Another US official said that there were "Omissions big enough to drive a tank through," like explanations on what happened to the 550 shells filled with mustard gas as also 150 bombs containing biological agents which UN could not account for in the late 1990s.

PTI