TRIPOLI, 24 December 2003 — The UN nuclear watchdog’s director general, Mohamed El-Baradei, is to visit Libya “in the coming days”, a Libyan official confirmed yesterday.

“Libya welcomes Mr. El-Baradei’s visit due to take place in the coming days,” Hassuna Shaush, a senior official at Libya’s Foreign Ministry, told AFP. “Mr. El-Baradei is to hold talks during his visit with (weapons) experts.”

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday he would visit Libya next week with a team of senior experts and that inspections would follow, “as early as next week”.

Libya’s agreement to sign a protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allowing for intrusive spot checks of nuclear sites was “a step in the right direction”, he told reporters at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna.

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi invited the world to come to Libya to see for itself that Tripoli was not concealing banned weapons, after promising that the country was abandoning its atomic bomb program. “Come and see... We don’t want to hide anything,” the Libyan leader told CNN in an interview broadcast yesterday.

Qaddafi’s oil-rich state, long on the US list of sponsors of terrorism, said last week it was abandoning plans to build an atomic bomb and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It now wants trading benefits, including an end to US sanctions.

“We have no intention to make these weapons, these WMD. But there are many rumors, many accusations, (much) propaganda against Libya, particularly in this field, and we have to stop this propaganda against us,” he said in English.

“And we say: Why are you accusing us and using propaganda? You exercise terrorist policy against the Libyan people by accusing us,” he said in the interview, which CNN said was conducted in a Bedouin tent 30 minutes outside the capital.

Libya’s moves to scrap its illicit weapons programs mark an about-face for the mercurial Qaddafi, who seized power 34 years ago in the North African desert nation of 5.5 million. For much of his rule, Libya has been under US or UN sanctions, accused of sponsoring or carrying out terrorist acts ranging from bombing airliners to training foreign guerrillas.

UN sanctions were lifted this year after Libya agreed to pay compensation for the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, which killed 270 people. But Washington kept its embargo in place. The US State Department said Washington would look at dropping the sanctions “as Libya’s policy changes, Libya’s behavior changes, Libya’s circumstances change”, spokesman Richard Boucher told a news briefing.

Asked what assurances he had received on sanctions being removed, Qaddafi said through an interpreter: “We have good faith in improving relations between our two respective countries. This cooperation will feed our technology industry. Vis-a-vis this equipment, we wish American companies and British companies to cooperate with us and to use them together for peaceful purposes.”

But he said he saw “dark aspects and sometimes bright aspects” in US President George W. Bush. “We do hope aspects that bright aspects will be predominant because we have no interest or no benefit from the dark side.”

British and US officials had been negotiating with Libya over banned weapons for nine months and Britain said Libya may have been prompted into its surprise move after observing the fate of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Qaddafi dismissed that, asking why Libya should follow the example of Iraq when other countries had dismantled their weapons programs in a transparent way. South Africa gave up its illicit arms programs a decade ago.

And he criticized Iraq’s US-led administration for showing pictures of a disheveled and disorientated Saddam when he was caught earlier this month. He said, through the interpreter, that he told British Prime Minister Tony Blair by telephone that the way Saddam was shown “made everybody sympathize with him”.