Missing weapons: New tape

2004-10-29 12:33

Washington - A videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with United States troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The video taken by KSTP of St Paul, Minnesota, on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally on Thursday on the ABC network.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, was quoted as telling The New York Times. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."

Major issue in campaign

The question of what happened to the tons of explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the US presidential campaign.

Democrat John Kerry says the missing explosives - powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or set off a nuclear weapon - are another example of the Bush administration's poor planning and incompetence in handling the war in Iraq. President George W Bush says the explosives were possibly removed by Saddam's forces before the invasion.

Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld entered the debate on Thursday, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before US forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.

"We would have seen anything like that," he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."

The Pentagon also declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base.

The Pentagon has said it's looking into the matter, and officials note that 400 000 tons of recovered Iraqi munitions have either been destroyed or are slated to be destroyed. - AP

- SAPA