UN arms experts in Iraq have focussed their attention on a facility suspected by the US of having been rehabilitated and used to produce biological weapons.
On the second day of inspections, a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency inspected the Al-Nasser factory, 25 km north of Baghdad.
The factory, which belongs to the industry ministry and which Iraqi officials say produces mechanical equipment, is located within the huge Al-Taji compound.
A US newspaper reported in August that a US spy satellite had photographed some 60 trucks moving about at the facility once called the Al-Taji Single Cell Protein Plant.
However Iraq's Trade Minister Mohammad Mahdi Saleh told journalists taken to Al-Taji in an on-site inspection in August that the facility in question was in fact a warehouse used by his ministry to stock foodstuffs.
In June 1991, UN weapons inspectors destroyed 62 Iraqi missiles, 32 warheads and 10 launchers at Al-Taji, a site they described as so massive it was more like a town than a camp.
Earlier today the US Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, said there needed to be a genuine change of heart by the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, if the UN weapons inspection programme was to succeed.
Mr Wolfowitz, who is regarded as one of the most hardline members of the Bush administration, said if Baghdad continued to maintain that it had no weapons of mass destruction it could be interpreted as a sign of non co-operation.
