Nuclear weapons inspectors expressed concern yesterday that warehouses containing highly radioactive material under UN seal may have been broken into at al-Tuwaitha, the nerve centre of Saddam Hussein’s secret nuclear bomb project.
The nuclear complex is being guarded by US marines and investigated by the Pentagon’s nuclear specialists, but it was unclear who broke the seals on the warehouse door.
An embedded American correspondent from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper quoted a US officer saying he had opened a door to a storage building containing sealed steel drums of radioactive material.
However, the paper yesterday quoted marine combat engineers as saying that ”looters or Iraqi officials” had broken the seals at the storage site, presumably before US forces arrived nearly a week ago.
Either way, David Albright, a Washington-based physicist and former UN weapons inspector, said the breaking of the seals was a bad omen.
”We’re really worried over what happens if someone has taken some of these radioactive sources out of there,” Albright said.
He added that it was unclear how long the site, south-east of Baghdad, had gone unguarded between the departure of its Iraqi caretakers and the arrival of the marines.
An officer at the site was quoted as saying: ”I went to the off-site storage buildings, and the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door, and there were all these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive material.”
A source familiar with pre-war UN inspections said that the steel door had been under UN seal.
”In the area of the radioisotopes the radiation is very high. Too long exposure would kill you,” he said.
According to one source close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the US had assured its director, Mohamed ElBaradei yesterday that the seals on containers holding the nuclear material had not been breached.
Dr ElBaradei is demanding that his nuclear inspectors be allowed back into Iraq to verify the large cache of nuclear material and to check any discrepancies that might arise from the containers being opened.
Nuclear experts familiar with the UN inspection effort, which was suspended before the war, expressed outrage at the suggestion in the reports from al-Tuwaitha that the Americans had uncovered suspect materials in a matter of days that the IAEA had missed during four months of recent inspections and seven years of monitoring in the 1990s.
In the four months before the war, IAEA experts made 14 inspections of al-Tuwaitha, a highly contaminated site 18 miles south of Baghdad where two nuclear reactors have been bombed, first in 1981 and then in 1991.
The IAEA has drafted a statement demanding to be allowed back to al-Tuwaitha, telling the Americans that the material represents a ”proliferation risk”.
”The only way to determine what’s happening is to go there,” said the source close to the IAEA. ”The agency has to get back there.”
An advance team of nuclear experts from the Pentagon’s defence threat reduction agency arrived at the site on Thursday and began inspecting the complex. – Guardian Unlimited Â