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Vast explosives cache reported missing in Iraq

U.N. agency confirms 377 tons of explosives have vanished

The explosives were looted from the al Qaqaa complex, a former Iraqi military facility south of Baghdad, shown in this undated photo, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The Associated Press

Updated: 7:30 p.m. ET Oct. 25, 2004VIENNA, Austria - Several hundred tons of conventional explosives were looted from a former Iraqi military facility that once played a key role in Saddam Hussein’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, the U.N. nuclear agency told the Security Council on Monday.

A “lack of security” resulted in the loss of 377 tons of high explosives from the sprawling Al-Qaqaa military installation about 30 miles south of Baghdad, said Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.

The IAEA fears “that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands,” said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the agency.

ElBaradei told the council the IAEA had been trying to give the U.S.-led multinational force and Iraq’s interim government “an opportunity to attempt to recover the explosives before this matter was put into the public domain.”

But since the disappearance was reported in the media, he said he wanted the Security Council to have the letter dated, Oct. 10, that he received from Mohammed J. Abbas, a senior official at Iraq’s Ministry of Science and Technology, reporting the theft of the explosives.

The materials were lost through “the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security,” the letter said.

The letter informed the IAEA that since Sept. 4, 2003, looting at the Al-Qaqaa installation south of Baghdad had resulted in the loss of 214.67 tons of HMX, 155.68 tons of RDX and 6.39 tons of PETN explosives.

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