Baghdad, Iraq ? The chief U.N. weapons inspectors will return to Baghdad on Feb. 8 for last-minute talks before their next Security Council report on the hunt for banned weapons in Iraq, Iraqi and U.N. officials said Saturday.

Arms monitors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei are seeking concessions to speed their investigators’ day-to-day work — in particular removing obstacles to U.N. reconnaissance flights and to private interviews with Iraqi scientists.

They prefer to see such issues resolved even before their visit next Saturday, said ElBaradei’s spokeswoman in Vienna, Austria, Melissa Fleming.

Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Mohamed al-Douri, said in New York the two sides would be “discussing all the outstanding issues, including interviews with Iraqi scientists.”

But neither al-Douri nor Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz in Baghdad, who also reported the planned talks, said anything about new proposals to end those deadlocks.

A pivotal report by Blix to the Security Council last Monday criticized the Iraqis as not having cooperated fully — by volunteering more information — in the first two months of arms inspections.

The inspectors’ next report, on Feb. 14, could swing the diplomatic balance toward or away from military action against Iraq, the “last resort” threatened by the United States and Britain.

The Iraqis on Thursday invited Blix and ElBaradei back to Baghdad, just 10 days after they completed discussions here over practical problems in the inspections.

The chief inspectors responded with a letter to the Iraqi government proposing talks Feb. 8-9, but also asking for what Fleming called “signals of progress” before the talks.

Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the U.N. inspectors in New York, said U.N. officials assumed the Iraqis accepted the purpose of the meeting as laid out in the letter. “If they do not, we would expect to hear from them soon,” he said.

ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, had indicated Friday that the chief inspectors should meet with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein if they returned. But Aziz seemed to rule that out.

The disagreement over surveillance flights involves a U.N. plan to use American U-2 spy planes to fly over Iraq in support of inspections.

The Iraqis say they would allow such flights as long as the United States and Britain halted air patrols over southern and northern Iraq while the spy planes were in the air. This way, they say, Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries would not mistake the reconnaissance aircraft for U.S. and British warplanes and fire on them.