FILE of weapons complex

(8 Jul 2004) SHOTLIST 1. Local people passing in from of yellow cake (uranium oxide) factory on other side of fence, inside Tuwaitha facility 2. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspector working on blue barrels 3. Various of inspectors with equipment, some in safety gear, yellow barrels in background, one moving big barrel on trolley 4. Inspector trying to untangle wires 5. Inspectors with equipment standing by blue barrels and big round containers 6. Shot of site, US troops staying out of the sun under camouflage net 7. Various of inspector with bag, walking into a building 8. Wide shot of site STORYLINE Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on Thursday said Iraq would not restart the nuclear weapons programme initiated by Saddam Hussein. The programme, along with Iraq's suspected chemical and biological weapons capability, was one of the coalition's reasons for invading Iraq last year. No evidence of an ongoing non-conventional weapons programme was ever discovered. Allawi made the announcement a few weeks after a pair of US government agencies secretly transported nearly two tons of low-enriched uranium and roughly one thousand highly radioactive objects from a former Iraqi nuclear research facility to the United States. Allawi's office said the US departments of defence and energy completed a joint operation to remove radiological and nuclear materials that terrorists or Iraqi guerrillas could have used to build a "dirty bomb". He said the materials also might have potentially been used by a future government that wished to resume the country's stalled nuclear weapons programme. Allawi's statement confirmed a June operation disclosed by the Energy Department, which said the material was airlifted out of the country to an undisclosed Energy Department laboratory in the United States for further analysis. UN officials on Wednesday had said the material that was transferred from Iraq originally had been placed under seal by the International Atomic Energy Agency at the sprawling Tuwaitha nuclear complex, 12 miles (19 kilometres) south of Baghdad. The head of the IAEA's office in New York said his agency had been informed by the US authorities of their intention to remove the materials, but stressed they had never sought authorisation from the IAEA. Under UN resolutions adopted after the 1991 Gulf War, the IAEA was authorised to oversee the destruction of Iraq's nuclear programme and monitor its activities to ensure that the programme was not revived. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...