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When weapons inspectors return to Iraq, their greatest challenge may not be tracking down Saddam Hussein's suspected nuclear and chemical-weapons facilities, but unearthing the country's bioterror labs.

Biological-weapons facilities are the hardest to detect and the most difficult to shut down, Canada's senior arms-control official said.

As a result, biological weapons are a greater immediate threat to the world than the possibility Iraq may develop nuclear warheads or produce new stockpiles of chemical weapons, said Jill Sinclair, the director general of the arms-control division at the Department of Foreign Affairs.

When UN weapons inspectors re-enter Iraq, their first priority must be finding labs that can produce anthrax and other deadly biological toxins, she said.

Holding up a half-full glass of water, she told a House of Commons committee yesterday that "much less than this can kill many."

Ms. Sinclair agreed with U.S. government assessments that biological weapons can be made in mobile labs that can be moved around Iraq to avoid detection.

"Biological weapons have always been the biggest concern because Iraq never declared [it had]them" after its defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

When they were first deployed, it took hundreds of UN inspectors years before they discovered Iraq's biological-weapons labs, Ms. Sinclair said.

Experts say it is nearly impossible to hide nuclear facilities from inspectors because they are large industrial plants that refine radioactive material and mill special metal alloys.

Chemical-weapons labs can be disguised to some extent within legitimate chemical plants. But chemical plants cannot be easily hidden because they, too, are large facilities.

Inspectors on the ground can determine whether chemical plants are producing harmless products or deadly weapons such as mustard gas, the poisonous agent Mr. Hussein used in earlier conflicts against Iran and Iraq's Kurdish minority.

But mobile biological-weapons labs are easier to move, Ms. Sinclair said.

"Nobody knows where anything is until the inspectors are back in."

The UN will have to establish a long-term regime for inspecting and monitoring facilities in Iraq to make sure new bioterror labs don't pop up, she said.

Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, said last week that it could take a year for teams to get a clear picture of what is in the Iraqi arsenal and to destroy weapons of mass destruction and the missiles that could be used to launch warheads.

He said satellite photos of nuclear facilities are not conclusive evidence that Iraq has nuclear weapons, which can only be determined by technical inspections on the ground.

Before they were forced out of Iraq in 1998, UN inspectors found large stockpiles of chemical weapons, but were unable to destroy them all.

There is no doubt of the "massive effort" by Iraq to acquire a variety of weapons that can wipe out large populations with a single attack, Ms. Sinclair said.

The inspectors had many unanswered questions and unexplored leads when they departed four years ago, she said.

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