| Sarin gas round found partly detonated in iraq Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=a_eQwYx7vT6I&refer=ushttp://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=a_eQwYx7vT6I&refer=us
Sarin Nerve Gas Round Found, Partly Detonated in Iraq (Update2) May 17 (Bloomberg) -- A small shell containing sarin nerve gas was discovered and partly detonated in Baghdad ``a couple of days ago,'' U.S. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said during a briefing televised from Baghdad.
The 155-millimeter round, which was rigged as an improvised explosive device, was found by a U.S. convoy and detonated before it could be rendered inoperable, producing a very small amount of nerve gas, Kimmitt said. Two members of the ordnance team were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent, he said.
U.S. President George W. Bush argued before the U.S.-led war to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that Iraq had to be attacked because it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Hussein's regime declared all of its sarin nerve gas rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War, Kimmitt said. Kimmitt said it was the first sarin shell the U.S. military has found.
Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or Unmovic, which searched Iraq for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons for almost four months until the war began in March 2003, said that without seeing the round mentioned by Kimmitt, he couldn't comment on whether the find is significant.
UN weapons inspectors ``did destroy a lot of that stuff in the early 90s, but we don't discount that remnants of chemical weapons remained,'' Buchanan said. ``We found 12 empty rounds intended for chemical weapons'' before the war, he said.
While U.S.-led coalition forces didn't find any weapons of mass destruction after the invasion of Iraq, Bush said last month there ``could still be'' some in the country. Arms experts including David Kay, chief U.S. arms inspector from June 2003 to January 2004, have said there most likely weren't any such weapons to find.
Older Shell
The shell was an older round with two compartments containing two chemical components that need to be mixed before the agent is produced, Kimmitt said today.
The device was designed to work after being fired from an artillery cannon and the ability to mix and distribute the gas from an improvised explosive device is ``very limited,'' Kimmitt said. Rigged the way it was ``it's virtually ineffective,'' he said.
Whoever rigged the round to explode appears not to have known the shell contained nerve agents, said Kimmitt. Sarin, when inhaled in a high concentration, can kill a person in a couple of minutes.
Nerve agents such as sarin cause ``a kind of death by suffocation'' through muscular paralysis, according to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which administers an international treaty.
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