Explosives seen after U.S. took Baghdad

Video shows Army troops at weapons site

By WILLIAM J. BROAD AND DAVID E. SANGER
THE NEW YORK TIMES

A video made by a television crew that was with U.S. troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The tape, broadcast yesterday by ABC News, appeared to confirm suspicions reported earlier this month to the IAEA by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the Al-Qaqaa site after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The videotape was taken by KSTP-TV, an ABC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Dean Staley, now a television news anchor at NorthWest Cable News in Seattle, was one of two KSTP-TV journalists on the scene. Staley said yesterday that he pulled video footage that photojournalist Joe Caffrey shot after recognizing the Al-Qaqaa area in a New York Times story about missing weapons in Iraq.

The 38-year-old journalist and Caffrey, accompanied by two members of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, visited a complex with dozens of bunkers, some of which were only protected by padlock and others that were open, Staley told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Inside they found crates of bomb parts and barrels of white powder, he said.

The weapons they saw might not be the same ones that are reported to be missing, Staley said, but "the video definitively shows that there were bunkers filled with tons of explosives that weren't guarded."

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