Iraq chemical arms feared taken

Iraq chemical arms feared taken

Site looted, but experts unsure what was there

Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press
Oct. 31, 2004 12:00 AM

Looters unleashed last year by the U.S.-led invasion
of Iraq overran a sprawling desert complex where a
bunker sealed by U.N. monitors held old chemical
weapons, according to a U.S. arms inspectors report.

Charles Duelfer's arms teams say that all U.N.-sealed
structures at the Muthanna site were broken into. If
the site's "Bunker 2" was breached and looted, it
would be the second recent case of restricted weapons
at risk of falling into militants' hands.

Officials are unsure whether this latest episode
points to a threat of chemical attack, as it isn't
known whether usable chemical warheads were in the
bunker or what may have been taken and by whom.

"Clearly, there's a potential concern, but we're
unable to estimate the relative level of it because we
don't know the condition of the things inside the
bunker," said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the U.N.
arms inspection agency in New York, whose specialists
have been barred from Iraq since the invasion.

Chief arms hunter Duelfer said by e-mail Friday from
Iraq that he was unaware of "anything of importance"
looted from the chemical-weapons complex. The report
his Iraq Survey Group issued on Oct. 6 said, however,
that it couldn't vouch for the fate of old munitions
at Muthanna.

One chemical-weapons expert said that even old,
weakened nerve agents, in this case sarin, could be a
threat to unprotected civilians.

The weapons involved would be pre-1991 artillery
rockets filled with sarin, or their damaged remnants,
weapons that were openly declared by Iraq and were
under U.N. control until security fell apart with the
U.S. attack. They are not concealed arms of the kind
President Bush claimed Iraq had but which were never
found.

In its Oct. 6 report, summarizing a fruitless search
for banned weapons in Iraq, Duelfer's group disclosed
that widespread looting occurred at Muthanna, 35 miles
northwest of Baghdad, after of the fall of the Iraqi
capital in April 2003.

A little-noted annex of the 985-page report said that
every U.N.-sealed location at the desert installation
had been breached in the spree, and "materials and
equipment were removed."

Bunker 2 at Muthanna State Establishment, once Iraq's
central chemical-weapons production site, was put
under U.N. inspectors' control in early 1991 after it
was heavily damaged by a U.S. precision bomb in the
first Gulf War. At the time, Iraq said 2,500
sarin-filled artillery rockets had been stored there.

The U.N. teams sealed up the bunker with brick and
reinforced concrete, rather than immediately attempt
the risky job of clearing weapons or remnants from
under a collapsed roof and neutralizing them.



The looting at Muthanna, a 35-square-mile complex in
the heart of the embattled "Sunni Triangle," is the
latest example of how sensitive Iraqi sites,
previously under U.N. oversight, were exposed to
potential plundering by militants or random looters in
Iraq's wartime chaos.

Last Monday, U.N. officials confirmed that almost 380
tons of sophisticated explosives, also under U.N.
seal, had disappeared from a military-industrial site
south of Baghdad, a location left unsecured by U.S.
troops advancing to Baghdad in April 2003.

Thousands of tons of other munitions are also
unaccounted for across Iraq. The issue has become a
flashpoint in the U.S. presidential race.