UN to broaden arms search

UN weapons inspectors began setting up a new office Saturday in the northern city of Mosul to broaden the range of their searches. Iraq's government declared that US funding and military training for Iraqi opposition groups violate international law and Iraqi sovereignty.

A team of experts in various weapons fields drove from Baghdad to Mosul 250 miles north in a convoy of white UN vans. The inspectors have visited sites near the city before, but they've then had to return samples and equipment to Baghdad.

The new base "will serve as a convenient location to conduct inspections, particularly in the north," UN spokesman Hiro Ueki said before the team left for Mosul early Saturday.

The eight UN vans, followed by an ambulance, arrived in Mosul mid-afternoon, and the arms inspectors raised the blue UN flag over the Nineveh Palace Hotel, their temporary headquarters until their new base is completed.

Iraq's allegation about America interfering in Iraqi affairs came in a letter from Foreign Minister Naji Sabri to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the official daily Al-Iraq reported Saturday. It said the letter was given to Annan by the Iraqi UN mission but did not say when.

Sabri said the US financing and military training of government opponents - whom he called "mercenaries" - violated international guarantees on the sovereignty of nations and amounted to aggression against an independent state.

The United States has funnelled millions of dollars to Iraqi opposition groups in recent years, and helped organise a London conference by the main groups in mid-December that named a steering committee to plan an Iraqi government should President Saddam Hussein be toppled. The groups are expected to meet again in northern Iraq - a Kurdish-ruled territory out of Saddam's control - on Jan. 15.

In October, the Pentagon announced it would give military training to thousands of volunteers opposed to the Iraqi regime under an order signed by President Bush. The training is expected to occur in Hungary.

On Friday, speaking to US Army troops in Texas, Bush said Saddam "did not even attempt to submit a credible declaration" on his alleged stockpiles of arms and weapons programs in Iraq's required statement to the UN Security Council on Dec. 8. The statement maintained Iraq has no more banned weapons.

In recent days, Bush has spoken at times of his hopes to settle the Iraq crisis peacefully and at others with renewed threats of force to disarm Saddam's regime if it does not relinquish chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them.