US wants no UN help probing missing explosives

4.00pm

NEW YORK - The United States said on Tuesday it saw no need for UN involvement in the search for 342 tonnes of high explosives missing in Iraq, but Russia said the Security Council should pursue the issue.

"It is a question which must be tackled by the Security Council," Russia's UN ambassador, Andrei Denisov, said, calling on the 15-nation UN body to both discuss the missing explosives and the eventual return of UN inspectors to Iraq.

"We have to react to the disappearance of explosives in Iraq, and the willingness of at least some (Iraqi) officials to welcome the renewal of the inspections," said Denisov. Russia, like the United States, is a permanent veto-wielding member of the 15-nation council.

US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said he was shocked by the report of the missing explosives, adding: "Looks to me like somehow the multinational force didn't stay on top of this."

Armitage agreed the missing explosives had created a dangerous situation, according to a transcript of his Monday interview with the Arab-language newspaper al-Hayat released by the State Department.

Arms experts said they feared the explosives -- which could be used to make a detonator for a nuclear bomb or blow up an airplane -- could be used to attack US-led or Iraqi forces in Iraq, or smuggled out of the country and sold to terrorists or countries with nuclear ambitions like neighbouring Iran.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog, reported the explosives' disappearance to the council on Monday.

It acted two weeks after Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology informed it that the explosives had been "lost after April 9, 2003, through the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

US presidential challenger John Kerry quickly pounced on the issue, accusing President George W. Bush of committing a massive blunder, while Bush administration officials played down the incident, saying the facts were unclear.

Following the report of the missing explosives, US Ambassador John Danforth said the immediate need was to quickly track down when they disappeared and what happened to them.

This was a job best left, he said, to the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led task force that has been unsuccessfully scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, a prime justification for last year's US invasion.

As for the idea of a Security Council discussion of the controversy, "I think that this is more a matter of tracking down the facts now than to just have a debate about it," Danforth said.

The IAEA, which monitored the explosives as part of its responsibility for ensuring Baghdad did not revive any nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programmes, had last verified the amounts being stored at Iraq's Al Qaqaa site in January 2003.

US forces who searched the site four months later went through 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings but found no explosives under IAEA seal, a US official said.

"It is possible that the Iraqis took the material out and dispersed it or that it was looted," the official said. "Very difficult at this point to know for certain."

The IAEA has been barred from most of Iraq since the war and has watched from afar as the former nuclear sites it once monitored have been stripped by looters.

In a resolution adopted in June, the Security Council said it intended at some point to raise the question of whether UN arms inspectors should return to Iraq.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq