BAGHDAD, Iraq — A
roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent (^) recently exploded
near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday.
Bush administration officials told
Fox News that mustard gas (^) was also recently discovered.
Two people were treated for "minor
exposure" after the sarin
incident but no serious injuries were reported. Soldiers
transporting
the shell for inspection suffered symptoms consistent with low-level
chemical exposure, which is what led to the discovery, a U.S. official
told Fox News.
"The
Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery
round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (^),
the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad.
"The
round had been rigged as an IED
(improvised explosive device) which was
discovered by a U.S. force convoy."
The round detonated before it would
be rendered inoperable, Kimmitt said, which caused a "very small
dispersal of agent."
A senior Bush administration
official told Fox News that the sarin gas shell is the second chemical
weapon discovered recently.
Two
weeks ago, U.S. military units discovered mustard gas that was used as
part of an IED.
Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (^) and others concluded
the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas
"ineffective."
They believe the mustard gas shell
may have been one of 550 for
which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to account
when he
made his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom
began last year.
Investigators are trying to
determine how insurgents obtained these weapons — whether they were
looted or supplied.
It also appears some top Pentagon
officials were taken by surprise
by Kimmitt's announcement of the sarin discovery; they thought the
matter was classified, administration officials told Fox News.
Kimmitt said the shell belonged to
a class of ordnance that Saddam Hussein's government said was
destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war (^). Experts believe both the
sarin and mustard gas weapons date back to the Persian Gulf War.
"It was a weapon that we believe
was stocked from the ex-regime time
and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to
explode like an ordinary IED and basically from the detection of that
and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in
it," Kimmitt said.
The incident occurred "a couple of
days ago," he added. The discovery reportedly occurred near Baghdad
International Airport.
It was the first announcement of
the discovery of such a weapon on
which Washington made its case for war. Washington officials say the
significance of the find is that some chemical shells do still exist in
Iraq, and it's thought that fighters there may be upping their attacks
on U.S. forces by using such weapons.
The Iraqi Survey Group is
a U.S. organization whose task was to
search for weapons of mass destruction after the ouster of Saddam
Hussein in last year's invasion.
The round was an old "binary-type"
shell in which two chemicals held
in separate sections are mixed after firing to produce sarin, Kimmitt
said.
He said he believed that insurgents
who rigged the artillery shell
as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the
dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very limited.
"The former regime had declared all
such rounds destroyed before the
1991 Gulf War," Kimmitt said. "Two explosive ordinance team
members
were treated for minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the
partial detonation of the round."
The shell had no markings. It
appears the binary sarin agents didn't
mix, which is why there weren't serious injuries from the initial
explosion, a U.S. official told Fox News.
Not everyone found the deadly
artillery surprising.
"Everybody
knew Saddam had chemical weapons, the question was, where
did they go. Unfortunately,
everybody jumped on the offramp and said
'well, because we didn't find them, he didn't have them,'" said
Fox
News military analyst Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.
"I doubt if it's the tip of the
iceberg but it does confirm what
we've known ... that he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mad destruction
that he used on his own people," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told
Fox News. "This does show that the fear we had is very real. Now
whether there is much more of this we don't know, Iraq is the size of
the state of California."
But there were more than weapons to
the need to depose of Saddam, he
added. "We considered Saddam Hussein a threat not just because of
weapons of mass destruction," Grassley said.
Iraqi
Scientist: You Will Find More
Gazi George, a former Iraqi nuclear
scientist under Saddam's regime,
told Fox News that he believes many similar weapons stockpiled by the
former regime were either buried underground or transported to Syria.
He noted that the airport where the device was detonated is on the way
to Baghdad from the Syrian border.
George said the finding likely will
just be the first in a series of discoveries of such weapons.
"Saddam is the type who will not
store those materials in a military
warehouse. He's gonna store them either underground, or, as I
said,
lots of them have gone west to Syria and are being brought back with
the insurgencies," George told Fox News. "It is difficult to look
in
areas that are not obvious to the military's eyes.
"I'm sure they're going to find
more once time passes," he
continued, saying one year is not enough for the survey group or the
military to find the weapons.
Saddam,
when he was in power, had declared that he did in fact
possess mustard-gas filled artilleries but none that included sarin.
"I think what we found today, the
sarin in some ways, although it's
a nerve gas, it's a lucky situation sarin detonated in the way it did
... it's not as dangerous as the cocktails Saddam used to make, mixing
blister" agents with other gases and substances," George said.
Officials:
Discovery Is 'Significant'
U.S. officials told Fox News that
the shell discovery is a "significant" event.
Artillery shells of the 155-mm size
are about as big as it gets when
it comes to the ordnance lobbed by infantry-based artillery
units. The
155 howitzer can launch high capacity shells over several miles;
current models used by the United States can fire shells as far as 14
miles. One official told Fox News that a conventional 155-mm
shell
could hold as much as "two to five" liters of sarin, which is capable
of killing thousands of people under the right conditions in highly
populated areas.
The Iraqis were very capable of
producing such shells in the 1980s
but it's not as clear that they continued after the first Gulf War, so
officials are reluctant to guess the age of the shell or the capacity
of the Iraqis prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom to produce such shells.
In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo
(^) cult
unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening
thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts
convicted the
cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentence him to be executed.
Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi
scientists, a single drop of
sarin can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no
known
instances of the Nazis actually using the gas.
Nerve gases work by inhibiting key
enzymes in the nervous system,
blocking their transmission. Small exposures can be treated with
antidotes, if administered quickly.
Antidotes to nerve gases similar to
sarin are so effective that top
poison gas researchers predict they eventually will cease to be a war
threat.
Fox
News' Wendell Goler, Steve Harrigan, Ian McCaleb, Liza
Porteus, James Rosen and The Associated Press contributed to this
report.
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