Lost Iraqi explosives gone before U.S. arrived?

By Colum Lynch and Bradley Graham
The Washington Post

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In reports to the Security Council yesterday, U.N. and Iraqi officials indicated that the explosives, including some under U.N. seal because of their potential use to detonate a nuclear bomb, were lost while the country was under U.S. occupation.

However, U.S. officials said a search of the facility by U.S. troops shortly after the fall of Baghdad last year turned up no evidence of the explosives.

The conflicting accounts generated confusion over who bore responsibility for allowing the loss of the explosives that had been stored at the sprawling Al-Qaqaa facility 30 miles south of Baghdad before the war. The munitions included the explosives RDX and HMX.

The disappearance of the material raised the possibility that some could have found its way into explosive devices used against U.S. and allied troops in Iraq — or could do so in the future.

But U.S. officials in both Washington and Baghdad played down such a likelihood, noting that the car bombs and roadside explosives that have menaced troops up to now have tended to be made from old artillery shells or dynamite.

Missing explosives A glance at the destructive power of the tons of explosives the U.N. says disappeared from a former military installation in Iraq. HMX: Also known as octogen, it is made from hexamine, ammonium nitrate, nitric acid and acetic acid. Because it detonates at high temperatures, it is used in various kinds of explosives and rocket fuels. RDX: Also referred to as cyclonite or hexogen, it is a white crystalline solid usually used in mixtures with other explosives, oils or waxes. It has a high degree of stability in storage and is considered the most powerful of the high explosives used by militaries. Plastic explosives: Experts say both HMX and RDX are key ingredients in plastic explosives such as Semtex and C-4, puttylike military substances that easily can be shaped. Libyan terrorists used just 1 pound of Semtex in 1988 to down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. C-4 or its main ingredients were used in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Nuclear use: Experts say HMX can be used to create a highly powerful explosion with enough intensity to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction. The Associated Press

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."

Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector who heads the Iraq Survey Group, said yesterday that a U.S. team inspecting the site in May 2003 turned up no evidence of explosives under U.N. seal.

"My sense is, it's been looted, it's gone missing," he said of the material. "I don't know the specifics, but it's not there now."

In a report to the United Nations, Mohammad Abbas, a senior official in the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology, said the explosives disappeared sometime after April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell to U.S. forces. The letter blamed "lack of security" for the loss.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, informed the Security Council that the last time IAEA inspectors were able to verify the presence of the explosives at Al-Qaqaa was in January 2003, two months before the U.S. invasion began.

Administration officials have acknowledged the inability of U.S. troops to secure the large stocks of weaponry discovered after the invasion.

But officials at both the Pentagon and State Department suggested yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa explosives may have been removed from the facility by Saddam loyalists before the invasion, then hidden or sent abroad.

"We don't know that this site was looted," a senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "All we know is that it's not there. We don't know whether it was moved by Saddam before the war."

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said U.S.-led forces searched the Al-Qaqaa facility after the invasion.

"Coalition forces were present in the vicinity at various times during and after major combat operations," he said. "The forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the facility. While some explosive material was discovered, none of it carried IAEA seals."

In satellite photos of the Qaqaa site taken in November 2003 and shown to The Washington Post yesterday by senior U.N. officials, signs of damage from previous U.S. bombing campaigns and looting were evident. But the facilities that stored the explosives HMX and RDX were still largely intact, according to the officials.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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