An artillery round containing deadly sarin nerve gas exploded after it was discovered by coalition forces in Iraq, causing a ”very small dispersal of agent”, a United States military spokesperson said on Monday.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said the 155mm shell had been rigged as a roadside bomb and was discovered by a passing US convoy. It was confirmed to contain sarin gas by members of the Iraqi Survey Group, the US team searching for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, he said.
”Two explosive ordnance team members were treated for minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the partial detonation of the round,” Kimmitt told a press conference.
”The round had been rigged as an IED [improvised explosive device], which was discovered by a US force convoy. A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable,” he said.
”This caused a very small dispersal of agent. The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War.”
He said the shell was designed to combine chemical agents to produce sarin after being fired from a gun but the amount of nerve gas generated by the improvised device was ”very limited”.
Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction was the main reason for the US-led invasion of Iraq more than a year ago but no stockpiles have been found since the war.
Monday’s announcement came after US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday the CIA and other US government bodies were at times deliberately misled about such weapons in the run-up to the war.
Powell’s comments on Sunday in an interview with NBC television were the first official admission that the US government had been fed disinformation about Saddam’s suspected arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and relayed it to the world community without seriously questioning it.
”It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading,” Powell said. ”And for that I am disappointed, and I regret it.”
Powell made a landmark presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5 2003 in an unsuccessful attempt to convince its members that Saddam had stockpiles of banned weapons and persuade them to authorise US-led military action against Iraq.
Powell insisted the US had ”first-hand descriptions” of mobile biological weapons factories that he said presented a threat to international security.
He said the information came from an Iraqi defector, a chemical engineer who supervised one of these mobile facilities, and ”other sources” who corroborated it.
Sarin, which killed 12 people and injured 5 000 others when the Aum Supreme Truth cult released it on the Tokyo subway in March 1995, was first produced by Nazi scientists in the 1930s.
It is considered 500 times more powerful than cyanide, but like other gases originally developed for war, sarin was never used on the battlefield. The fact that both Germany and the Allies had their own stockpiles of the deadly weapon proved a sufficient deterrent to its use.
First developed as an organophosphate pesticide, sarin works by being inhaled or absorbed through the skin and kills by crippling the nervous system.
Symptoms include nausea and violent headaches, blurred or tunnel vision, drooling, muscular convulsions, respiratory arrest, loss of consciousness and then death, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In high doses, Sarin paralyses the muscles around the lungs and prevents chemicals from ”switching off” the body’s secretions, so victims suffocate or drown as their lungs fill with mucus and saliva.
Even a tiny dose of sarin — which, like other nerve gases such as soman, tabun and VX, is odourless, colourless, and tasteless — can be deadly if it enters the respiratory system, or if a drop comes into contact with the skin.
Even if it does not kill, sarin’s effects can be permanent, inflicting lasting damage to the victim’s lungs, eyes and central nervous system.
It is made from widely available chemicals including organic phosphorous, sodium fluoride and alcohol, but specialist knowledge and apparatus are needed to make pure and long-lasting sarin. — Sapa-AFP