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wrbones
04-04-03, 07:52 AM
Coalition Discovers 'Suspicious Site' Near Baghdad







Friday, April 04, 2003

NEAR BAGHDAD, Iraq — Thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote, unidentified liquid and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare were found by U.S. troops Friday at an industrial site south of Baghdad, a U.S. officer said Friday.





Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said the materials were found Friday at the Latifiyah industrial complex, about 25 miles south of Baghdad.

"It is clearly a suspicious site," Peabody said.

Peabody said troops found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

He also said they discovered atropine, used to counter the effects of nerve agents.

The plant itself was shown on U.S. military maps as including underground storage facilities, Reuters reported. Some contained liquid, some powder. The books and manuals were in a safe, Captain Kevin Jackson told Reuters near Baghdad.

"It's unclear at this point what the vials contain and we're sending a team of experts to examine them," Jackson said.

The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least a dozen times, including as recently as Feb. 18.

At least one bottle of the deadly chemical weapon, Tabun, was reportedly found. Tabun is a clear, colorless and tasteless liquid with a slightly fruity odor, and is lethal.

If skin absorption is great enough, death may occur in one to two minutes, or it may be delayed for one to two hours. Lethal respiratory dosages kill in one to 10 minutes, and liquid in the eye kills almost as rapidly.

The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa.

Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks also told reporters during a U.S. Central Command briefing in Qatar Friday that special forces in Iraq's western desert had found what they believed to be a training school for handling nuclear, chemical and biological warfare.

During the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. jets bombed the plant.

On April 1, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, in a statement on Iraqi television, repeated Baghdad's position that it had no weapons on mass destruction. Referring to reports that gas masks and other chemical gear had been found elsewhere in the country, he said the coalition might plant weapons of mass destruction to implicate Iraq.

"Let me say one more time that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction," he said. "The aggressors may themselves intend to bring those materials to plant them here and say those are weapons of mass destruction."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

greybeard
04-04-03, 11:04 AM
In a related note, MSNBC personell have independantly verified that there is Ricin nerve agents present in one of the arms caches seized recently. Interesting to note that Ricn is one of the agents supposedly in the French inventory.

Cyanid & mustard agents found in the Euphrates River. Are the trying to poison the coalition troops or trying to get rid of evidence?