The Pentagon on Thursday released an aerial photograph of the Iraqi facility where hundreds of tons of powerful explosives have gone missing, showing two trucks parked by a bunker just before the US-led invasion, as the issue took the forefront of the presidential race.
The bunker was at Qaqaa Explosives Storage facility where the high explosives were kept under seals placed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but Defense Department spokesman Lawrence DiRita said US officials did not know what the trucks were doing there.
He also could not say if the bunkers contained any of the explosives reported missing earlier this month by the Iraqi government and the IAEA.
International Atomic Energy Agency say it happened after the war
The International Atomic Energy Agency stepped back into the controversy over missing explosives in Iraq Thursday, insisting that almost 330 tonnes had indeed vanished from a depot in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
It contradicted a claim on US television that the amount was much less.
The fate of the missing explosives has become a major issue in the US presidential election campaign, with Democratic challenger John Kerry accusing incumbent President George W. Bush of incompetence in his handling of post-invasion Iraq.
Video evidence suggests explosive vanished after fall of Baghdad
On 18 April, 2003, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, a news crew from a Minneapolis TV station KSTP-TV, enbedded with troops from the 101st Airborne Division, entered bunkers at Al-Qaqaa. At one, the troops broke a seal to get inside, where they found barrels filled with explosives, according to a reporter for the station.
Having seen the station's videotape, former weapons inspector David Kay said the seal is consistent with those used by the International Atomic Energy Agency and that the explosives in the barrel were the type of explosives missing from the facility.
"That's either HMX or RDX," Kay said, referring to the types of explosives. "I don't know of anything else in Al-Qaqaa that was in that form."
The photograph was taken on March 17, 2003 - two days before US forces invaded Iraq and the same day that the last IAEA inspectors left the country.
"We believe this is a period of time when there was no international observation and prior to the beginning of the war, and certainly prior to the presence of US forces," DiRita told reporters.
He said the Pentagon released the photograph to show activity on the facility before the war, but was not suggesting the picture showed the removal of the missing high explosives.
"There is a perception that this facility was under some sort of hermetic seal between the time the IAEA last looked at the facility in January [2003], when they actually counted weapons... and the time US forces arrived in April," he said.
"The only point we've been trying to make is not that we know what happened there, but that stuff was happening on this facility at the time at which it was under Saddam's control," he said.
The declassified aerial photograph was posted on the Pentagon's website, www.defenselink.mil.
DiRita said another photograph taken on April 1, 2003, of a nearby airfield also showed a lot of vehicles on it.
"But we don't know what that means. It's only a kilometer or two away from the bunkers," he said, adding that that photograph was not being released.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said earlier in a radio interview that it was "very likely" that the explosives were removed before the war by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, but offered no concrete evidence.
In the interview with the Philadelphia radio station, Rumsfeld argued that removing the explosives after the arrival of US forces would have been detected because of the size of the operation required.
"The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, is I think at least debatable. And it's very likely that, just as the United States would do, Saddam Hussein moved munitions when he knew the war was coming," he said.
AFP
US releases aerial photo of Iraq weapons site
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