BAGHDAD Russia on Saturday kept up the flow of flights into Baghdad, a day after a French plane landed there, in defiance of the U.S. hard line on the decade-old UN sanctions against Iraq, AFP said.
A Tupolev 154 owned by the Russian Vnukovo Airlines landed at Saddam International Airport carrying five tons of medical supplies and a 100-member delegation of Russian oil officials, MPs and a football team.
It was the third such flight from Russia, which supports a lifting of sanctions and has oil deals in the pipeline with Iraq, since the airport reopened on August 17.
The delegation was to spend three days in Iraq, during which the Torpedo-Zil football team was to play a friendly match.
With the air embargo on Baghdad falling apart, Vnukovo Airlines also plans to fly a 120-strong delegation of European lawmakers and business people to Iraq from Paris on September 29.
Russian planes already flew to Baghdad on September 17 and for the opening of the airport, and Moscow had notified the UN sanctions committee overseeing the embargo against Iraq that it planned a third flight.
The sanctions committee, which is chaired by the Netherlands and includes the 15 Security Council members, said it had not made any formal objection to the latest flight.
But a similar mission from France on Friday provoked anger from the U.S. State Department, which accused Paris of violating a UN air traffic embargo under sanctions imposed for Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The French plane, a chartered Boein g-737-800 was carrying a 75-member delegation which included some 30 medical staff and 40 young French sports figures and artists.
The aircraft defied a sanctions committee request to delay the departure of what organizers insisted was a humanitarian flight.
It was the first flight from France to Iraq in a decade. France has joined Russia and China in a divided UN Security Council, arguing that the sanctions should be ended.