UN weapons inspectors have rejected criticism by the US and Iraq that they are failing to do their job properly.
Washington said on Wednesday that they were not being aggressive enough and questioned whether they were capable of finding hidden weapons.
Baghdad said they were spying for the US and Israel.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is conducting the hunt for nuclear weapons, said: ”We believe we are doing the job we need to be doing. We have been unannounced and thorough.”
The leader of those looking for biological and chemical weapons, Demetrius Perricos, insisted that they were ”getting results”.
An inspection on Wednesday produced a dozen Iraqi shells loaded with the agent for mustard gas, the weapon President Saddam used on the Kurds in 1988.
But the shells did not amount to a discovery: their presence at the desert site has long been known.
UN officials rejected allegations by the Iraqi vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, on Wednesday that the inspectors were spies for the US and Israel.
Mr Ramadan also protested about the inspection of a presidential palace in Baghdad.
But yesterday President Saddam called on all Iraqis to cooperate with the inspectors, to disprove the US allegation that their country possessed weapons of mass destruction.
In a message to mark the Muslim holiday Eid, he said the decision to allow the inspectors access to all sites in Iraq, including his own presidential palaces, had been designed to keep the Iraqi people ”out of harm’s way”.
His deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, told ABC News: ”We don’t have weapons of mass destruction.
”We don’t have chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry, but we have equipment which was defined as dual use.”
But the White House said that President Bush had ”solid evidence” that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction.
The president and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they had that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction if it were not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said.
”The Iraqi government has proved time and time again to deceive, to mislead and to lie.”
Mr Aziz’s statement was ”just as false as statements that Iraq made in the late 90s when they said they had no weapons of mass destruction, when it was found they indeed did. There is no basis to that.”
A watershed will be reached this weekend when Iraq has promised to provide the comprehensive list of biological, chemical and possible nuclear weapons and components for them demanded by the US resolution. UN officials expect President Saddam to swamp them with thousands of pages of documents listing all equipment classified as dual-use: that is, it can be used for civil or military purposes.
Iraq has promised to hand over the list on Saturday.
It will have to be flown to New York to be presented to the security council, possibly on Sunday.
US and British government sources say they will not give a knee-jerk reaction but will pore over the documents, comparing them with their own intelligence.
That intelligence will be passed to the weapons inspectors to investigate, a process that could take months. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001