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Iraqi Officials: Explosives May Have Vanished Before Invasion
Officials with the Iraqi agency cited by the New York Times earlier this week as the source for its claim that 380 tons of high explosives went missing from the Al Qaqaa weapons depot after the U.S. liberation now say that the report might be wrong.
"How, where, when [the explosives were] taken, all these questions, we don't have answers," Dr. Rashad M. Omar, Iraq's Minister of Science and Technology, told the Times on Friday.
Mohamed al-Sharaa, who heads up the national monitoring directorate at the ministry, backed Dr. Omar's account, telling the Times: "We don't say it's impossible" that the material was somehow taken out of Al Qaqaa before the American forces came through the area.
Their accounts contradict a document from the Ministry of Science and Technology cited by the Times on Monday, that said hundreds of tons of HMX and RDX explosives were "in this site after April 9 [2003]" - six days after U.S. forces had reached Al Qaqaa.
Yesterday, ABC News broadcast video from its Minneapolis-St Paul affiliate, KSTP-TV, that it said was filmed on April 18, 2003 by reporters embedded with the 101st Airborne Division.
The station claimed they found "bunker after bunker" filled with the now missing explosives.
Oddly, the crates visible in photos posted to KSTP's web site were labeled in English, with no Iraqi markings apparent. The station did not say how many of Al Qaqaa's 32 bunkers it filmed. KSTP did not attempt to quantify the amount of explosives its reporters examined.
Pfc. Ken Dixon, who was with the 101st when it arrived at Al Qaqaa on April 10, 2003, offered a conflicting account, telling the Fox News Channel on Wednesday that the two or three bunkers he searched were for the most part empty.
Satellite photos released by the Pentagon Thursday show heavy truck activity outside the al Qaqaa bunkers in the days before the U.S. invaded.
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