Armed Group Claims to Possess Missing Explosives From Iraqi Depot
Associated Press
October 28, 2004 6:07 a.m.
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An armed group claimed in a video to have obtained a huge amount of explosives missing from a munitions depot in Iraq and warned that it will use them if foreign troops threaten Iraqi cities.
A group calling itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade, claimed "heroic mujahedeen have managed by the grace of God and by coordinating with a ... number of the officers and the soldiers of the American intelligence to obtain a very huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqaa facility, which was under the protection of the American forces."
The group's claim couldn't be independently verified.
The speaker in the video was surrounded by masked, armed men standing in front of a black banner with the group's name on it. The tape was obtained Wednesday by Associated Press Television News.
"We promise God and the Iraqi people that we will use it against the occupation forces and those who cooperate with them in the event of these forces threatening any Iraqi city," the man added.
Nearly 400 tons of conventional explosives have disappeared from the al-Qaqaa facility south of Baghdad, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The U.N. agency's chief Mohamed ElBaradei reported the disappearance to the U.N. Security Council on Monday, two weeks after Iraqi officials told the nuclear agency that 377 tons of explosives had vanished as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security."
Meanwhile, Russia angrily denied allegations Thursday that Russian forces had smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous."
"I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structures couldn't have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because all Russian military experts left Iraq when the international sanctions were introduced during the 1991 Gulf War," Mr. Sedov told the Associated Press.
"I can understand when they try to make an elephant out of a fly, but this time there wasn't even a fly," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Mr. Sedov as saying.
Copyright (c) 2004 The Associated Press
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