Mustard, sarin warheads found

2004-07-02 08:37

Washington - Polish troops recently discovered more than a dozen warheads containing mustard or sarin gas in Iraq, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a radio interview.

Rumsfeld said Polish Defence Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski told him about the find when they met earlier this week at a Nato summit in Istanbul.

"He pointed out that his troops in Iraq had recently come across - I've forgotten the number, but something like 16 or 17 - warheads that contained sarin and mustard gas," Rumsfeld told Newradio 600 KOGO of San Diego, California in an interview on Wednesday.

"Now these are weapons that we always knew Saddam Hussein had that he had not declared, and they have tested them," he said.

The Pentagon released a transcript of the interview on Thursday.

The head of the US-led hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, had previously reported that 10 to 12 warheads containing sarin or mustard gas have been found.

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the number could have gone up since Duelfer's spoke about the chemical rounds June 24 in an interview with Fox television.

Rumsfeld added that he had not seen the weapons or the results of the tests, but noted that the Poles believed they "in fact were undeclared chemical weapons - sarin and mustard gas - quite lethal."

"And that is a discovery that just occurred within the last period of days," he said.

Rumsfeld also said there had been "a lot of intelligence speculation and rumours and chatter about the fact that Saddam Hussein may have placed some of his weapons of mass destruction in Syria prior to the start of the war.

"Until that can be validated and proved, you'll find people in the administration not talking about it" he said.

The question of what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - or indeed whether it had any hidden stockpiles at the time of the war - remains intensely controversial.

- AFP