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Investigate nuclear looting { May 5 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Yahoo! News Mon, May 05, 2003
Top Stories - Reuters
U.N. Wants to Investigate Iraq Nuclear Looting
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By Louis Charbonneau
VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said on Monday it had asked the United States to let it send a mission to Iraq (news - web sites) to investigate reports of widespread looting at the country's nuclear facilities.
"(International Atomic Energy Agency chief) Mohamed ElBaradei has written to the U.S. with a request to send a mission to Iraq ... to investigate the state of the facilities there," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told Reuters.
"We have not yet received a response," she said, declining to give further details about the letter. "We have been assured by the U.S. that they would secure these facilities, but the agency finds these reports (of looting) disturbing."
Last month the IAEA asked the U.S. to secure Iraq's nuclear facilities to protect them from looters in the post-war chaos. Washington assured the U.N. it would prevent the removal of material from these sites.
But on Sunday the Washington Post reported that sites housing large amounts of highly radioactive material appeared to have been looted and that it was impossible to say whether nuclear materials were missing.
The IAEA, whose nuclear weapons inspectors returned to Baghdad last November after a four-year hiatus, has a detailed inventory of radioactive materials stored at the Tuwaitha nuclear research facility and other sites in the country which may have been looted.
Tuwaitha had been sealed by the IAEA, but U.S. forces were reported to have broken some of the seals last month and to have entered the site.
The mission ElBaradei wants to send to Iraq would be separate from the teams who hunted for signs Baghdad renewed its ambitious atomic weapons program, as Washington had alleged, before the U.S. decided to use military force to disarm Iraq.
"This would be an investigative mission to find out what has happened at the facilities," Fleming said.
WORRIED ABOUT DIRTY BOMBS
While most of the radioactive material found at these sites would be unusable for atomic weapons, the IAEA is concerned that some of the material could end up in the hands of terrorists who could use it for so-called dirty bombs.
A dirty bomb is made by attaching radioactive material to a conventional explosive like dynamite to disperse it over a wide area. These bombs are aimed more at creating panic than physical damage.
Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said on Sunday he had no information from military or intelligence sources about the lootings referred to in the Washington Post's eyewitness report.
"I don't know that there was a special concern that there was nuclear-related material at that particular site," he said.
The U.S. has frustrated ElBaradei and chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, whose UNMOVIC monitoring and verification agency hunted for Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and ballistic arms, by keeping them out of post-war Iraq.
"I don't think the international community would be satisfied as long as we, the U.N. weapons inspectors, do not go there and examine the discoveries," ElBaradei said on Monday in an interview with the German broadcaster ZDF. "We have years of experience, the mandate of the U.N. and the credibility."
The U.S. has said its own experts would hunt for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. So far, they have failed to find any conclusive proof Baghdad had any banned arms.
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