In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear weapons, a senior Iraqi official said last week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting.
The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants looking for valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them.
"They came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," Araji said. "They knew what they were doing; they knew what they wanted. This was sophisticated looting."
These types of facilities were cited by the Bush administration as a reason for invading Iraq, but they were left largely unguarded by coalition forces in the chaotic months after the invasion Araji's statements came just a week after a UN agency revealed that approximately 90 key sites in Iraq had been looted or razed after the US-led invasion. Satellite imagery analyzed by two UN groups -- the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC -- confirm that some of the sites identified by Araji appear to be totally or partly stripped, according to officials at those agencies.
Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from eight or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons.
That program was the rationale for the US-led invasion, but occupation forces found no unconventional arms and CIA inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
Araji said he had no evidence where the equipment had gone. But his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery from the arms establishment that the war was aimed at neutralizing had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments.
Araji said he believed that the looters themselves were more interested in making money than making weapons.
Araji said that if the equipment had left Iraq, its most likely destination was a neighboring state.
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