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UN: 400 tons of Iraq explosives missing
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-10-26 14:45
The U.N. nuclear agency warned Monday that insurgents in Iraq may have
obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives that can be used in the kind of
car bomb attacks that have targeted U.S.-led coalition forces for months.
IAEA General
director and nuclear watchdog Mohammed El Baradei (L) speaks to chairman
of board of Governors Antonio Nunez Garcia-Sauco. Nearly 400 tonnes of
powerful explosives that could be used in conventional or nuclear missiles
disappeared from an unguarded military installation in Iraq, the
International Atomic Energy Agency said.
[AFP/file] | International Atomic Energy Agency
chief Mohamed ElBaradei reported the disappearance to the U.N. Security Council
on Monday, two weeks after he said Iraq told the nuclear agency that the
explosives had vanished from the former Iraqi military installation as a result
of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security."
The disappearance raised questions about why the United States didn't do more
to secure the Al-Qaqaa facility 30 miles south of Baghdad and failed to allow
full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.
The White House played down the significance of the missing weapons, but
Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry accused President Bush of "incredible
incompetence" and his campaign said the administration "must answer for what may
be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in
Iraq."
Al-Qaqaa is near Youssifiyah, an area rife with ambush attacks. An Associated
Press Television News crew that drove past the compound Monday saw no visible
security at the gates of the site, a jumble of low-slung, yellow-colored storage
buildings that appeared deserted.
"The most immediate concern here is that these explosives could have fallen
into the wrong hands," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
The agency first placed a seal over Al-Qaqaa storage bunkers holding the
explosives in 1991 as part of U.N. sanctions that ordered the dismantlement of
Iraq's nuclear program after the Gulf War.
Iraqi boys shout
anti-U.S. slogans behind an American soldier conducting a search operation
in eastern Baghdad October 24, 2004. U.S. Army leaders on October 25 said
the all-volunteer Army was up to the task of crushing the Iraqi insurgency
and defeating terrorism even if it might take many years, possibly
decades. [Reuters] | IAEA inspectors last saw the
explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on
the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but
didn't view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.
Nuclear agency experts pulled out of Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion
later that month, and have not yet been able to return for general inspections
despite ElBaradei's repeated urging that they be allowed to finish their work.
Although IAEA inspectors have made two trips to Iraq since the war at U.S.
requests, Russia and other Security Council members have pressed for their
full-time return — so far unsuccessfully.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said coalition forces were present in
the vicinity of the site both during and after major combat operations, which
ended May 1, 2003 — and searched the facility but found none of the explosives
material in question. That raised the possibility that the explosives had
disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate invasion
aftermath.
The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the nuclear agency at that
point that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be.
Saddam Hussein's regime used Al-Qaqaa as a key part of its effort to build a
nuclear bomb. Although the missing materials are conventional explosives known
as HMX and RDX, the Vienna-based IAEA became involved because HMX is a "dual
use" substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb
and set off a nuclear chain reaction.
Both are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which
are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am
Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 170 people.
Insurgents targeting coalition forces in Iraq have made widespread use of
plastic explosives in a bloody spate of car bomb attacks. Officials were unable
to link the missing explosives directly to the recent car bombings, but the
revelations that they could have fallen into enemy hands caused a stir in the
last week of the U.S. presidential campaign.
"These explosives can be used to blow up airplanes, level buildings, attack
our troops and detonate nuclear weapons," senior Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart said
in a statement. "The Bush administration knew where this stockpile was, but took
no action to secure the site."
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration's first
concern was whether the disappearance constituted a nuclear proliferation
threat. He said it did not.
"We have destroyed more than 243,000 munitions" in Iraq, he said. "We've
secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed."
McClellan said the IAEA informed U.S. mission in Vienna on Oct. 15 about the
missing explosives at Al-Qaqaa. He said national security adviser Condoleeza
Rice was notified "days after that," and she then informed President Bush.
ElBaradei told the council the agency had been trying to give the U.S.-led
multinational force and Iraq's interim government "an opportunity to attempt to
recover the explosives before this matter was put into the public domain."
But since the disappearance was reported Monday in The New York Times,
ElBaradei said he wanted the Security Council to have the letter dated Oct. 10
that he received from Mohammed J. Abbas, a senior official at Iraq's Ministry of
Science and Technology, reporting the theft of 377 tons of explosives.
The letter from Abbas informed the IAEA that since April 9, 2003, looting at
the Al-Qaqaa installation had resulted in the loss of 215 tons of HMX, 156 tons
of RDX and six tons of PETN explosives.
Diplomats said there was nothing to suggest that ElBaradei, who had irritated
the Bush administration before the war by insisting there was no evidence that
Saddam had revived his nuclear program, had intended to keep the report a secret
until after the Nov. 2 election.
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