US finds Iraqi mobile germ warfare lab - Pentagon

US forces in Iraq have found a trailer used by the toppled government of President Saddam Hussein as a mobile biological weapons laboratory, a Pentagon official said yesterday.

The announcement was made by Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, during a Pentagon briefing. Cambone said no actual germ warfare agents have yet been discovered in the lab but added that the trailer would be disassembled and searched extensively for evidence of weapons.

Meanwhile a senior State Department official said yesterday the US expects to show the UN Security Council within days a resolution lifting sanctions against Iraq and fixing arrangements for oil sales.

"I'd go for days," the official told reporters in answer to a question on how long it would take to prepare a resolution.

Cambone said a "mobile production facility" painted in a military color scheme came into the hands of US forces on April 19 at a Kurdish checkpoint near the town of Tall Kayf in northern Iraq. The trailer was found on a heavy-equipment transporter typically used for carrying tanks, he added.

Aboard the trailer was equipment that can be used to make biological weapons - living microorganisms used deliberately to spread disease - including a fermenter that could help produce the germ warfare agents, Cambone said.

An Australian newspaper said it had been handed an audiotape in Baghdad of a message possibly from ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein calling on his people to wage a "secret" war against US forces.

The Sydney Morning Herald said it was handed the tape on Monday after the people in possession of it failed to pass it on to Arabic cable news network al-Jazeera.

In Iraq US forces seized weapons from a Muslim group and ejected it from the psychiatric hospital yesterday, taking over security at the facility where patients were raped and looters rampaged after the war.

A young woman was curled up under a blanket on her metal cot in the Rashad Hospital women's ward, her head covered with swarms of flies. Another swayed listlessly in the yard.

"These were two of the six women who were raped," said Leila Kaazim, a nurse who disguised herself in patients' clothes so she could remain with the women and not be singled out when hundreds of men looted the hospital over several days in April.