Inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog have completed an inventory of Iraq's declared nuclear material and the agency's head said U.N. arms experts should return to the country to finish their job. The routine survey of Iraq's stocks of natural and low-enriched uranium accounted for all the material remaining in the country, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said on Saturday. "No nuclear material had been diverted," Fleming said. The United States removed 1.8 tonnes of nuclear material from Iraq after the facility it was stored in was looted. Unlike their pre-war counterparts, these inspectors were not searching for signs of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq. They were performing a routine stock-taking task that even Iraq's ousted President Saddam Hussein allowed the U.N. agency to carry out after barring U.N. weapons inspectors from the country in the wake of U.S. and British bombing raids in 1998. "The material -- natural or low-enriched uranium -- is not sensitive from a proliferation perspective and is consolidated at a storage facility near the Tuwaitha complex, south of Baghdad," the IAEA said in a statement. --More 2336 Local Time 2036 GMT
