UNITED NATIONS – U.N. weapons experts have found 20 engines used in banned Iraqi missiles in a Jordan scrap yard along with other equipment which could be used to make weapons of mass destruction, an official said Wednesday.
The discoveries were revealed to the U.N. Security Council by acting chief U.N. inspector Demetrius Perricos during in a closed-door briefing.
The U.N. team was following up on an earlier discovery of a similar Al Samoud 2 engine in a scrap yard in the Dutch port of Rotterdam. Perricos said inspectors also want to check in Turkey, which has also received scrap metal from Iraq.
Perricos told the Security Council said U.N. inspectors do not know how much material that they had monitored came from Iraq.
Perricos suggested that the interim Iraqi government, which will assume sovereignty when the U.S. and British occupation of the country ends June 30, may want to reconsider “the whole policy for the continued export of metal scrap” which apparently started in mid-2003 and is regulated by the U.S.-led coalition.
“The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks … thereby also rendering the task of the disarmament of Iraq and its eventual confirmation, more difficult,” Perricos said, according to the text of his briefing.
Afterwards, he told reporters that up to a thousand tons of scrap metal was leaving Iraq every day.
During last week’s visit to Jordan, Perricos told the council that U.N. experts visited “relevant scrap yards” with the full cooperation of Jordanian authorities and discovered 20 SA-2 missile engines.
The U.N. team also discovered some processing equipment with U.N. tags – which show it was being monitored – and “a large number of other processing equipment without tags, in very good condition.”
In its quarterly report to the council on Monday, the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission which Perricos heads, said a number of sites in Iraq known to have contained equipment and material that could be used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been cleaned out or destroyed.
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