Weapons go missing in Iraq

2005-06-04 09:47

Jennifer Loven

Washington - The Bush administration played down a report in which United Nations weapons inspectors documented additional materials found to have been missing from weapons sites in Iraq.

White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said the Bush administration had acted to ensure sites were secured, and he expressed doubt that the looted materiel had made its way into other countries' weapons programmes.

In a report to the UN Security Council, acting chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos said experts on satellite imagery had determined that material usable in the manufacture of biological or chemical weapons or banned long-range missiles had been removed from 109 sites, up from 90 sites reported in March.

The sites have been emptied of equipment to varying degrees; the largest percentages of missing items were at 58 missile facilities. For example, 289 of the 340 pieces of equipment to produce missiles had been removed, about 85% of the total, the report said.

Inspectors barred

Biological sites were the least damaged, according to the analysts at the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

Perricos said he's reached no conclusions about who removed the items or where they went. He said it could have been moved elsewhere in Iraq, sold as scrap, melted down or bought.

He said the missing material can be used for legitimate purposes. "However, they can also be utilised for prohibited purposes if in a good state of repair," he said.

McClellan said the United States has helped remove low-enriched uranium and radioactive sources; offered jobs to weapons experts from Saddam Hussein's programmes to keep them from taking their expertise elsewhere; and helped Iraq establish an independent radioactive source regulatory authority.

"We have been working closely with the government in Iraq to ensure that Iraq's former weapons of mass destruction personnel and proliferation materials do not contribute to proliferation programs in other countries," McClellan said.

The US-led coalition has barred the UN inspectors from returning to Iraq since the invasion in 2003 that ended President Saddam Hussein's government. The current Iraqi government wants to eliminate the inspection programme.

In their absence, the inspectors have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to UN monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

Since Saddam's ouster, US teams took over the weapons search. Former chief arms hunter Charles Duelfer and his Iraq Survey Group found no weapons of mass destruction in the country, discrediting President George W Bush's stated rationale for invading Iraq.

- AP