WASHINGTON – The infantry commander whose troops first captured the Iraqi weapons depot where 377 tons of explosives disappeared said Wednesday it is “very highly improbable” that someone could have trucked out so much material after U.S. forces had arrived in the area.
Two major roads that pass near the Al-Qaqaa installation were filled with U.S. military traffic in the weeks after April 3, 2003, when U.S. troops first reached the area, said Col. David Perkins. He commanded the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, the division that led the charge into Baghdad.
Perkins and others in the military acknowledged that some looting at the site had taken place. But he said a large-scale operation to remove the explosives using trucks almost certainly would have been detected.
Perkins, now a staff officer at the Pentagon, was made available by Defense Department spokesmen. Perkins’ account comes in the middle of a furious exchange of accusations between the campaigns of President Bush and Sen. John Kerry over what happened to the missing explosives.
Larry Di Rita, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, said what ultimately happened to the explosives is unknown. The department is investigating. But Perkins’ description seemed to point toward the possibility that the explosives were removed before the U.S.-led invasion to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, rather than during the chaos afterward.
The colonel did not directly offer that conclusion.
But the Pentagon said a statement, “The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd I.D.’s arrival at the facility.”
The Kerry campaign has pointed to the missing explosives as evidence of the Bush administration’s poor handling of the war. Bush officials have responded that more than a thousand times that amount of explosives and munitions in Iraq have been recovered or destroyed.
Mike McCurry, an adviser to Kerry, said, “From some of the Pentagon reporting today, there is a window that’s available there where either just prior to or just after the invasion, there could have been an opportunity for either Saddam to move the weapons or for something happening after that facility had been abandoned.
“And that is up to the administration to best determine how to answer that question when that happened. But they don’t have an answer, and that’s what we’re asking for,” McCurry said.
Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives vanished as a result of “theft and looting … due to lack of security.”
A letter from Iraq’s Ministry of Science and Technology said the explosives were stolen after coalition forces took control of the capital.
The explosives were known to be housed in storage bunkers at Al-Qaqaa. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003.
The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time that March 15 and reported that the seals were not broken; therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country before the invasion, which started on March 20.
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