The tour for the media, part of a campaign by Baghdad to repudiate US allegations that it is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, was the latest in a series conducted over the past weeks.

It came as Iraq stepped up a diplomatic drive to avert threatened US military action, saying it would discuss a conditional return of United Nations weapons inspectors with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg Tuesday.

The White House dismissed the meeting as pointless. "Iraq changes positions on whether it will let the inspectors in more often than (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein changes bunkers," President Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer , told reporters.

Reporters were flown by helicopter to a site at al Qaim, in Anbar province, 280 miles west of Baghdad, accompanied by Hussam Mohammed Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, the office used for liaison with UN inspectors.

They were shown a uranium extraction plant destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War. The floor was littered with empty and damaged barrels and heaps of twisted iron bars and concrete slabs.

Debris was removed from the plant, built in the 1980s, under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision, Baghdad says.

"This site, as you see, is completely destroyed and allegations that Iraq has rebuilt this site and it is now working to extract uranium for a secret nuclear program are absolutely false," Amin said. "There is no such activity neither here nor anywhere in Iraq.

"It is impossible to rebuild this site because we need to import sophisticated equipment and material from abroad, and the second essential reason is that we have no intention to carry out nuclear activity," he said.

(China Daily September 3, 2002)