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U.S. Officials Express Concern Over Possible Additional Sarin-Filled Shells in Iraq
Days after a roadside bombing involving an artillery shell suspected of containing sarin, U.S. officials said yesterday that there may be even more such munitions containing the nerve agent in Iraq, according to the Associated Press (see GSN, May 17). On Saturday, an artillery shell rigged to explode detonated near a U.S. military convoy in Iraq. While no one was hurt in the blast, U.S. soldiers who later removed the bomb experienced symptoms consistent with low-level nerve gas exposure, a U.S. official said. The bomb apparently contained two chemicals that were designed to mix and produce sarin, but the chemicals did not properly mix when the bomb was detonated, the official said. U.S. officials would not comment on whether the shell was filled with sarin, and whether it indicated that Iraq possessed chemical weapons shortly before last year’s war as the Bush administration has claimed, according to AP. “The jury is still out” as to whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that the evidence of sarin was recovered through a field test, which can be imperfect, and that more tests were needed. “We have to be careful,” he said. Former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay said the artillery shell might have been a munition that was overlooked when former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said he destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s. Kay said that he doubted that the shell came from a hidden stockpile of weapons, AP reported. “It is hard to know if this is one that just was overlooked — and there were always some that were overlooked, we knew that — or if this was one that came from a hidden stockpile,” Kay said. “I rather doubt that because it appears the insurgents didn’t even know they had a chemical round,” he added (Katherine Pfleger Shrader, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, May 17).
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