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U.N. Inspectors Find Chemical in U.N. Office
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 30, 2007; 5:30 PM
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 30-- United Nations weapons inspectors stumbled upon evidence of Saddam Hussein's elusive weapons of mass destruction -- a vial of potentially lethal chemical gas that was put in a U.N. storage box more than ten years ago and forgotten, officials announced Thursday.
Experts from the U.N. Monitoring and Verification Commission -- which is set to shut down its operations -- found the lethal agent, phosgene, last Friday as they prepared to archive more than 16 years of documents on Iraqi weapons programs. They said the agent, which was left by UNMOVIC's successor agency, UNSCOM, is under seal and poses no threat to the public.
The FBI and the New York Police Department went to UNMOVIC's office near U.N. headquarters to examine the agent before transporting it to a military laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland.
"There is no immediate risk or danger," said Marie Okabe, a spokeswoman for UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. She said the U.N. would launch an investigation to determine how the chemical gas made its way to the United Nations.
"It should never have been here in the first place, so we'd like it to be that way when the FBI takes it away," said Brian Mullady, an UNMOVIC expert.
The discovery provided an embarrassing end to an extraordinary and largely successful 16-year effort by the U.N. to find and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The chemical gas was recovered from Saddam Hussein's notorious Muthanna chemical weapons facility in 1996, according to Ewen Buchanan, UNMOVIC's spokesman. It remains unclear how it made its way to UNMOVIC's storage facility, where it shared space with an Iraqi Scud missile engine, Russian gyroscopes and 125 cabinets filled with sensitive information about Iraq's weapons programs.
Buchanan said U.N. experts first discovered a collection of metal and glass containers with a mysterious liquid substance on Friday. But they didn't find an inventory identifying the contents until Wednesday.
One vial contained phosgene -- a chemical agent first used in World War I--and the others held chemicals used to calibrate equipment.
"Following discovery of these items, UNMOVIC chemical weapons experts sealed the packages and placed them in a safe," according to an UNMOVIC statement. "The experts also tested the environment surrounding the packages using a portable chemical detector and found no concentration of toxic vapors."
A Russian chemical weapons expert who works for UNMOVIC, Svetlana Utkina, said that the phosgene could have proven deadly.
"It's toxic, it affects your lungs. Your lungs would collapse immediately if you inhale this substance," she said. If it had been opened by U.N. inspectors and evaporated, she predicted "around five people will get severe problem; a couple of people will be dead."
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These nitwits can be trusted? |
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