U.N. experts find parts of banned Iraqi missiles in scrapyard

? U.N. weapons experts have found 20 engines used in banned Iraqi missiles in a Jordan scrapyard along with other equipment which could be used to make weapons of mass destruction, an official said Wednesday.

The discoveries were revealed to the U.N. Security Council by acting chief U.N. inspector Demetrius Perricos during in a closed-door briefing. The text was obtained by The Associated Press.

The U.N. team was following up on an earlier discovery of a similar Al Samoud 2 engine in a scrapyard in the Dutch port of Rotterdam. Perricos said inspectors also want to check in Turkey, which has also received scrap metal from Iraq.

Perricos told the Security Council said U.N. inspectors do not know how much material that they had monitored orginated in Iraq.

U.N. inspectors were pulled out of Iraq just before the war began in March 2003, and the United States has refused to allow them to return, instead deploying its own teams to search for weapons of mass destruction.

Perricos suggested that the interim Iraqi government, which will assume sovereignty when the U.S. and British occupation of the country ends on June 30, may want to reconsider “the whole policy for the continued export of metal scrap” which apparently started in mid-2003 and is regulated by the U.S.-led coalition.