Explosives cache in Iraq missing

VIENNA, Austria -- The U.N. nuclear agency warned Monday that insurgents in Iraq may have obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives that can be used in the kind of car bomb attacks that have targeted U.S.-led coalition forces for months.

Diplomats questioned why the United States didn't do more to secure the former Iraqi military installation that had housed the explosives, which they say posed a well-known threat of being looted. Others criticized the United States for not allowing full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.

The White House played down the significance of the missing weapons, but Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry accused President Bush of "incredible incompetence" and his campaign said the administration "must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq."

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei reported the disappearance to the U.N. Security Council on Monday, two weeks after he said Iraq told the nuclear agency that 377 tons of explosives had vanished from the Al-Qaqaa facility south of Baghdad as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security."

Al-Qaqaa is near Youssifiyah, an area rife with ambush attacks. An Associated Press Television News crew that drove past the compound Monday saw no visible security at the gates of the site, a jumble of low-slung, yellow-colored storage buildings that appeared deserted.

"The most immediate concern here is that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told The Associated Press.

The agency first placed a seal over Al-Qaqaa storage bunkers holding the explosives in 1991 as part of U.N. sanctions that ordered the dismantlement of Iraq's nuclear program after the Gulf War.

IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn't view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.

Nuclear agency experts pulled out of Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion later that month, and have not yet been able to return for general inspections despite ElBaradei's repeated urging that they be allowed to finish their work. Although IAEA inspectors have made two trips to Iraq since the war at U.S. requests, Russia and other Security Council have pressed for their full-time return -- so far unsuccessfully.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said U.S.-led forces searched the Al-Qaqaa facility after the invasion.

"Coalition forces were present in the vicinity at various times during and after major combat operations," he said. "The forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the facility, but found no indicators of WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. While some explosive material was discovered, none of it carried IAEA seals."

Saddam Hussein's regime used Al-Qaqaa as a key part of its effort to build a nuclear bomb. Although the missing materials are conventional explosives known as HMX and RDX, the Vienna-based IAEA became involved because HMX is a "dual use" substance powerful enough to be used in an atomic bomb to set off a nuclear chain reaction.

Both are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 170 people.

Insurgents targeting coalition forces in Iraq have made widespread use of plastic explosives in a bloody spate of car bomb attacks. Officials were unable to link the missing explosives directly to the recent car bombings.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration's first concern was whether the disappearance constituted a nuclear proliferation threat. He said it did not.

"We have destroyed more than 243,000 munitions. We've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed," he said.

"Remember, at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there was some looting, and some of it was organized. There were munitions caches spread throughout the country, and so these are all issues that are being looked into by the multinational forces and the Iraqi Survey Group."

Since the disappearance was reported Monday in The New York Times, ElBaradei 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 letter from Abbas informed the IAEA that since April 9, 2003, looting at the Al-Qaqaa installation had had resulted in the loss of 215 tons of HMX, 156 tons of RDX and six tons of PETN explosives.

At the State Department, deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said the United States hadn't known about the missing explosives until Oct. 15.

"This is the first time that we knew that this material under IAEA seal was not where it was supposed to be," Ereli said. The Pentagon has ordered an investigation, he said.