Baghdad — Iraq has complained in a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the United States is violating international law by supporting anti-government mercenaries, the official Al-Iraq newspaper reported Saturday.

A team of UN weapons experts, meanwhile, went to the northern city of Mosul to establish a new office and broaden the range of the inspections. UN spokesman Hiro Ueki said in Baghdad that the new base "will serve as a convenient location to conduct inspections, particularly in the north."

In a letter to Mr. Annan, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri cited funds allocated to Iraqi opposition groups and for military training of government opponents, saying these actions violated international charters guaranteeing the sovereignty of individual countries.

The newspaper said the letter was delivered to Mr. Annan by Iraq's UN mission, but it did not say when.

The United States has funnelled millions of dollars to Iraqi opposition groups in recent years, and President George W. Bush recently authorized the U.S. army to train opponents of President Saddam Hussein's government.

Mr. Bush has threatened to invade Iraq if it does not give up its alleged arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, as required by UN Security Council resolutions. Iraq denies it has any banned weapons and claims that is being borne out by current UN inspections. It says the real U.S. agenda is to invade, install a puppet regime and seize Iraqi oil wealth.

On Friday, Mr. Bush repeated his assertion that Iraq's Dec. 8 declaration to the Security Council that it has eliminated all illegal weapons was not credible. But he also said he only would wage war as a last resort.

Also Friday, Hans Blix, head of the UN inspectors searching Iraq for evidence of banned weapons, said the Iraqi government is co-operating with inspectors but there were several issues he wanted to raise during a Jan. 18 visit to Baghdad.

He said there are "questions that have arisen as a result of [Iraq's] long declaration ... and we'd like to follow up some of those."

Mr. Blix said last month that Iraq's declaration had not provided sufficient details about its production of missile engines, recovery of 50 destroyed conventional warheads, the loss of 550 mustard gas shells, production and weaponization of the deadly VX nerve agent and its unilateral destruction of biological warfare agents.

On Saturday, UN inspectors visited three sites in and around Baghdad and a fourth, the College of Agriculture, in the southern city of Basra, according to Iraqi officials.

The UN inspectors must certify that Iraq is free of all weapons of mass destruction, and the means to deliver them, before UN economic sanctions on the country can be lifted. The sanctions were imposed by the Security Council after Iraq's 1990 invasion of neighbouring Kuwait.