Early troops at site didn't search for explosives

By KIMBERLY HEFLING
The Associated Press

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The first U.S. military unit to reach the Al-Qaqaa military installation after the fall of Baghdad did not have orders to search for the nearly 400 tons of explosives that are missing from the site, the unit spokesman said yesterday.

When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after coalition troops seized Baghdad on April 9, 2003, there were already looters throughout the facility, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public-affairs officer for the unit, told The Associated Press.

The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area," Wellman wrote in an e-mail message. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.

"Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they [high-explosive weapons] were everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.

His remarks appeared to confirm the observations of an NBC reporter embedded with the army unit who said yesterday she saw no signs that the Americans searched for the powerful explosives during their 24 hours at the facility en route to Baghdad, 30 miles to the north.

NBC News reporter Lai Ling Jew, who accompanied the 101st Airborne division, said the unit seized Al-Qaqaa April 10 — a day after Baghdad fell — and remained there for 24 hours before joining the 3rd Infantry Division in the capital.

She told MSNBC, an NBC cable-news channel, that "there wasn't a search."

"The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad," she said. "As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."

Their comments came two weeks after Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives had vanished from the former military installation as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The letter said the explosives were stolen after coalition forces took control of Baghdad.
 
The disappearance, which the U.N. nuclear agency reported to the Security Council on Monday, has raised questions about why the United States didn't do more to secure the facility and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.

Russia, citing the disappearance, yesterday called on the U.N. Security Council to discuss the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq. But the U.S. said American inspectors were investigating the loss and that there was no need for U.N. experts to return.

The missing explosives have become a major issue in the final week of the presidential campaign, with Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday questioning whether the explosives were still at the facility when U.S. troops arrived, and the Kerry campaign calling the disappearance the latest in a "tragic series of blunders" by the Bush administration.

The Al-Qaqaa explosives included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in repeated bomb attacks. HMX is also powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.

The explosives had been housed in bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. They visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003 and reported that the seals were not broken — therefore, the weapons were still there.