VIENNA, Austria – 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.
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.”
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said U.S.-led forces searched the Al-Qaqaa facility, near Youssifiyah, 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, but found no indicators of WMD (weapons of mass destruction).”
Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector, told The Washington Post that a U.S. team inspecting the site in May 2003 turned up no evidence of explosives under U.N. seal.
The atomic energy 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.
IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed new seals on the bunkers, the agency said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn’t view the explosives because the seals were not broken.
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.
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.
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.
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