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Chemical agents mistakenly sent to UN

Potentially hazardous chemicals mistakenly shipped from an Iraqi chemical weapons plant have been found in a UN building but experts insisted on Thursday that they posed no immediate risk.

UN deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said that while winding up their activities, UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) inspectors discovered "gram quantities of certain liquid substances including phosgene (COCl2)," a substance which she described as "potentially hazardous."

The metal and glass containers were first located on last Friday at the UNMOVIC office near the UN headquarters.

But it was only on Wednesday that an inventory of the items was recovered and showed that one of the items may contain phosgene suspended in oil, which an UNMOVIC statement called "an old generation chemical warfare agent."

Phosgene is a colorless, poisonous industrial chemical used to make plastics and pesticides. It was used extensively during WW I as a choking agent.

With cooling and pressure, phosgene gas can be converted into a liquid so that it can be shipped and stored. When liquid phosgene is released, it quickly turns into a gas that stays close to the ground and spreads rapidly, according to the US Centers for Disease Control.

Okabe said the UNMOVIC office area was screened with chemical weapons detection equipment and no toxic vapors were found.

She later told reporters that three containers containing the chemicals were turned over to the FBI on Thursday for analysis.

UNMOVIC said in a statement that an initial probe revealed that the substances had been recovered from a former Iraqi chemical weapons facility, al Muthanna, by inspectors in 1996.

"UNMOVIC experts believe the packages are properly secured and pose no immediate risk or danger to the immediate public," it added.

"These items should not have ended up, obviously, at the New York offices. Normally, they would be transported to an appropriately equipped laboratory for analysis," White House press secretary Tony Snow said in Washington.

"I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of red-faced people over at the UN trying to figure out how they got there," he said.

"In any event, they've done some testing in the air. There's no danger to the folks involved," Snow said.

UNMOVIC spokesman Ewen Buchanan confirmed that the substances had been shipped to New York "by mistake."

"It should not have come here because we don't have the facilities to handle it here," he said. "Now we will try and investigate back to 1996 how come it was sent here."

Asked why the substances had not been analyzed at the time they were seized, Buchanan replied: "Probably we didn't have the capability to do the analysis there in Iraq, which is why we sent a lot of material to other countries, to government laboratories which would help us with the analysis."

UNMOVIC was set up in 1999 to replace the former UN Special Commission and continue its mandate to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.

But four years after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, UNMOVIC inspectors failed to turn up any weapons of mass destruction allegedly stockpiled by Saddam Hussein and as a result their work was officially shut down by the UN Security Council in June.

The inspectors had pulled out of Iraq on March 18, 2003, immediately before the US-led invasion that overthrew Hussein, and were not allowed to return.
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