BAGHDAD, 9 June 2003 — United Nations experts surveyed a looted storage facility at Iraq’s main nuclear site yesterday under the watchful eyes of the US military, which has placed tight limits on their activities in Iraq.

The seven experts of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), wearing white protective suits, worked at a storage centre known as Site C, a three-building complex in the vast Tuwaitha compound, 20 km south of Baghdad.

US soldiers confiscated the videotape of a Reuters cameraman filming the scene, saying no media coverage was permitted near the once top-secret compound.

The IAEA team arrived in Iraq on Friday on a limited mission to check on looting from the site, where low-enriched uranium known as yellow-cake was stored in barrels. Looters emptied some of the barrels and sold them to local people for $2 each. US forces say they paid $3 a barrel to recover the stolen items and five radiological devices.

Some locals who unwittingly washed clothes or stored food in the barrels say children are falling ill, but IAEA and US military officials say they believe the health risk is low. The IAEA team is operating under strict guidelines from the Pentagon, which does not want a renewed role for the agency or other UN arms inspectors in postwar Iraq.

The United States is expanding its own team to hunt for Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, cited by London and Washington as the main justification for the war. No such weapons have been found. Saddam also remains missing.

While excluding UN arms inspectors, the two occupying powers promised the United Nations an important role in postwar Iraq and are coordinating with UN humanitarian agencies, as well as with UN special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The envoy held talks yesterday with Adnan Pachachi, an 80- year-old former Iraqi foreign minister, a potentially influential figure in post-Saddam politics.

It is not yet clear how Vieira de Mello’s mission will mesh with the efforts of the occupying powers to create an interim Iraqi administration to help rebuild the shattered country.

Looting has plagued Iraq since Saddam’s overthrow on April 9, but the ransacking of Baghdad’s famed antiquities museum has proved less comprehensive than earlier feared.