Reply #26: IAEA defends missing explosives report [View All]

[hnsez]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1230263.htm


A report on the amount of conventional explosives missing from an Iraqi storage site did not overstate the stockpile's size as a US media report suggests, the UN nuclear watchdog says.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had said that 342 tonnes of high explosives had disappeared from a site near Baghdad.

Iraq told the IAEA the explosives at the sprawling Al Qaqaa military facility had gone missing through theft and looting due to lack of security after the US-led invasion.

But ABC News (America) reports that confidential IAEA documents show that on January 14, 2003, UN inspectors found just over three tons of one type of explosive, RDX.

That inspection was conducted before the war began.

"The bulk of the RDX was stored at another site that was under Al Qaqaa's jurisdiction," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

She says that the report seen by ABC only covers the Al Qaqaa site itself.

The second site, Al Mahaweel, is roughly 45 kilometres from Al Qaqaa.

"They (Iraq) considered that site part of Al Qaqaa and that's how it was always declared," she said.

"IAEA inspectors inventoried that site on January 15, 2003," the day after the Al Qaqaa inspection reported by ABC.

RDX is one of three types of explosive at the Al Qaqaa site that arms experts say could potentially be used to make a detonator for a nuclear bomb, blow up an airplane or building, or in numerous other military and civilian applications.

However, Ms Fleming says it is possible that the Iraqi report on missing explosives overstated the amount of RDX by 10 tons because it did not take account of an earlier Iraqi statement that that amount had been used for civilian purposes.

The IAEA has yet to verify the Iraqi statements because it has been barred from most of Iraq since the war.

It has watched from afar as the former nuclear sites it once monitored have been stripped by looters.

-- Reuters