2nd Site With U.N.-Sealed Arms Was Looted, Inspectors Report
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://nytimes.com/2004/10/31/international/middleeast/31chemical.htmlPublished: October 31, 2004
The Associated Press
Looters overran an Iraqi complex last year where a bunker holding old chemical weapons was sealed by United Nations monitors, American arms inspectors have reported.
The American inspectors say all of the sealed structures at the Muthanna site, 35 miles northwest of Baghdad, were broken into. But it is unknown if usable chemical warheads were in the bunker, 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 United Nations arms inspection agency, whose specialists have been barred from Iraq since the invasion.
In a lengthy Oct. 6 report summarizing a fruitless search for banned weapons in Iraq, the inspectors known as the Iraq Survey Group disclosed that widespread looting occurred at Muthanna after the fall of the Iraqi capital in April 2003.
An annex of the 985-page report said every United Nations-sealed location at the desert installation had been breached in the looting spree, and "materials and equipment were removed."
Bunker 2 at Muthanna State Establishment, once Iraq's central chemical weapons production site, was put under the control of the United Nations in early 1991 after it was damaged by an American bomb in the Persian Gulf war. At the time, Iraq said 2,500 sarin-filled artillery rockets had been stored there.
The United Nations teams sealed 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.
A C.I.A. analysis hypothesized in 1999 that all the sarin must have been destroyed by fire. But a United States General Accounting Office review last June questioned that analysis, and the United Nations, whose teams were there, said the extent of destruction was never determined.
One chemical weapons expert said 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 United Nations control until security fell apart with the American attack.
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