Equipment which could be used in an illicit nuclear bomb program has disappeared from previously monitored sites in Iraq, and radioactively contaminated items from there have been found abroad, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has told the UN.
Installations in former Iraqi president's Saddam Hussein's nuclear bomb program were being systematically dismantled, its director general, Mohammed ElBaradei, has told the Security Council, warning of the implications for trafficking.
In a letter to Sir Emyr Jones Parry, the British diplomat presid-ing over the security council, ElBaradei said his inspectors had "been able to identify quantities of industrial items, some radioactively contaminated, that had been transferred out of Iraq from sites [previously] monitored by the IAEA."
These did not not include "high precision equipment" with a dual civilian or military use which would be valuable in a nuclear bomb program. But he added: "The disappearance of such equipment and materials may be of proliferation significance." ElBaradei said.
The warning will further embarrass the US and British governments, which justified the war in Iraq with the alleged threat of weapons of mass destruction, insisting that Saddam had an active nuclear bomb program. ElBaradei appealed for information about any of the vanished equipment.
On Monday night the Iraqi science and technology minister, Rashad Omar, invited the UN nuclear inspectors to return to Iraq to check on the missing equipment and materials.
"The locations that belong to the science and technology ministry are secure and under our control," Omar told reporters.
He said that Tuwaitha, the vast compound south of Baghdad which contained Iraq's main nuclear facility, was being turned into a science park.
"The IAEA came back one month ago, it inspected the plant and other ones and didn't say anything," he said.
"We are transparent. We are happy for the IAEA or any other organization to come and inspect," he said, adding that he had not seen the agency's report to the Security Council.
The run-up to the war in Iraq last year was marked by intense hostility between the Bush administration and the weapons inspectors, Washington and London scorning the inspections, an effort that is now known to have successfully dismantled Saddam's secret bomb program in the mid 1990s.
The inspectors have been virtually barred from Iraq by the Americans since before the war and ElBaradei's information on the missing equipment has come from satellite photography and other sources.
Some of the contaminated equipment and material from Iraq is believed to have been located in Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and the Netherlands.
Iran is widely suspected of conducting a clandestine bomb project and might be keen to obtain some of the sophisticated engineering equipment on the loose in Iraq.
The past nine months have also seen revelations about an extensive international network of nuclear smugglers, centred in Pakistan, supplying contraband equipment to at least three countries.
"The invasion of Iraq was supposed to be about stopping weapons of mass destruction. It was supposed to be about stopping nuclear materials from getting out from under UN control," Greenpeace said on Tuesday.
"The only winners in this story are those who are looking to capitalize on security failures by scoring loose nukes," the group said.
Greenpeace raised the alarm about nuclear chaos in Iraq last year after representatives visited the Tuwaitha nuclear complex, south of Baghdad.
In June, just before the US handed authority in Iraq to the interim government, the US forces secretly flew almost two tonnes of uranium and associated equipment from Iraq to the US, causing a diplomatic row with the IAEA, which is mandated to monitor and verify the nuclear complexes and stockpiles.
The IAEA, ElBaradei said, "continues to be concerned about the widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq's nuclear program."
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
RSS