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United Nations: Despite being barred from Iraq by the United States led coalition, United Nations weapons inspectors are continuing to collect information on Baghdad's biological and chemical weapons and its missile programmes and preparing for a possible role in the future.

The world body has 51 inspectors on its staff and some of the Security Council members have suggested that they continue with their activities in future to ensure that Iraq does not acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Suggestions have also been made to make the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) a permanent body for inspection of biological and chemical weapons as it has developed extensive expertise on monitoring such weapons.

The Security Council is expected to discuss on Monday the quarterly report of UNMOVIC released yesterday when once again the issue of its future role would come up. The quarterly report outlines the activities undertaken by UN inspectors to seek new information about Iraq's weapons.

Several members want the Commission to continue its inspections in Iraq after the coalition withdraws but that would require a fresh mandate.

In its report, the Commission said it was collecting information from Governments as also analysing imagery from commercial satellite of Baghdad, Mosul and other areas where there had been concentration of inspection sites and comparing them with pre-war images.

"The identification of damage at the sites during the hostilities and post-war reconstruction and other changes make it possible to update site line diagrams needed to support the future of any monitoring activities," the report said.

It said that Iraq had considerable capacity in building missiles but there is little evidence that it had gone beyond Al Samoud 2 missile. However, closer investigation is needed to determine whether Iraq was truing to use two-stage rockets, which would have enabled the missile to go beyond 150 km range allowed under the Security Council resolutions.

The Commission has also determined that the strain of anthrax found on R400 bombs, which Iraq says it had destroyed unilaterally was same as Baghdad had declared that it had weaponised. But the report expressed doubts that the Saddam Hussein regime had large stocks of WMDs.

The UN inspections had started in 1991 to ferret out and destroy Iraq's WMDs and continued until 1998 when inspectors were withdrawn ahead of air strikes by US and Britain. Later, Saddam Hussein did not allow them to return until late 2002 when Iraq agreed to allow them to carry out inspection when the Bush administration threatened Baghdad with military action.

However, they once again left when the Bush administration asked the world body to pull out ahead of the military action. Later, the US set up its own group under the leadership of David Kaye to find weapons of mass destruction and barred the Commission from carrying out an investigation.

Kaye had led inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1991 to determine whether Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons programme.

PTI