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UN arms inspectors on Monday visited a research center for missile technology and three alcohol plants in their fifth-day searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
A team of arms experts went into the military facilities that developed guidance and control systems for long-range missiles in Baghdad's Waziriya district.
Iraq has been banned from owning missiles that have a range of over 150 km since the end of the 1991 Gulf war, triggered by Iraq's occupation of neighboring Kuwait.
A statement by the experts after the inspection said that some equipment tagged by previous inspectors in the Waziriya site, which had been monitored before December 1998, was missing.
"In 1998 the site contained a number of pieces of equipment tagged by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and several monitoring cameras," the statement said.
"None of these was currently present at the facility. It was claimed that some had been destroyed by the bombing of the site, some had been transferred to others sites," the statement added.
Another inspection team visited three alcohol factories on the northeast outskirts of Baghdad.
Unlike those sites that the inspectors had visited since they resumed operations Wednesday after a four-year suspension, one of the alcohol plants had never been inspected before.
Both groups, accompanied by officials from Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate, were allowed into the sites immediately after their arrival.
The weapons inspectors arrived in Baghdad last Monday, the first back in Iraq since UN arms inspectors withdrew in 1998.
Continuous spats about alleged espionage activities between Iraq and the UN arms inspectors, who were commissioned to verify that Iraq has been disarmed, led to crisis in 1997 and 1998, and eventually the air war against Baghdad on Dec. 17-19, 1998.
The inspectors had since been barred from entering Iraq.
Iraq's first real test will come on Dec. 8 when it will be obliged by UN Security Council Resolution 1441 to submit a full account of its weapons programs, although Iraq insists it has no biological, chemical or nuclear arms.
"Further material breach" of Iraq's obligations would incur "serious consequences," the UN document adopted on Nov. 8 warned.
By Jan. 27, the inspectors must give their first report to the UN Security Council.
(Xinhua News Agency December 3, 2002)
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