Sarin Nerve Agent Bomb Explodes in Iraq

[Ally_Kat]

Sarin Nerve Agent Bomb Explodes in Iraq
By CHRIS TORCHIA, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. Two people were treated for "minor exposure," but no serious injuries were reported.

"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy.


"A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent," he said.


The incident occurred "a couple of days ago," he said.


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."


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.

[Mr Grimsdale]

'Nerve gas bomb' explodes in Iraq
An artillery shell containing a small amount of the nerve gas sarin has exploded in Iraq.
Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt said the blast had caused a small release of the substance and two people had been treated for exposure to the agent.

The substance was found in a shell inside a bag discovered by a US convoy a few days ago, he said.

It appears to be the first evidence of nerve gas existing in Iraq since the start of the US-led war last year.

'Limited effect'

The 155mm artillery round had been set up as a roadside bomb and it exploded before the US military were able to diffuse it.


Gen Kimmitt said the dispersal of the nerve agent from a device such as the homemade bomb was "limited".

"The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War," he said.

However, a senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity.

He said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained.

Sarin is a toxic nerve gas 20 times as deadly as cyanide.

A drop the size of a pin-head can kill a person by effectively crippling their nervous system.

The gas is one of a group of nerve agents invented by German scientists in the 1930s as part of Adolf Hitler's preparations for World War II.

Although the Germans never released sarin in battle, it was used to lethal effect by Iraq during the 1980s both in the war against Iran and against the Kurds.

After the Gulf War, United Nations inspectors found large quantities of sarin in production at an Iraqi chemical weapons plant.

The Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, also used the nerve agent in a Tokyo subway in 1995, in which 12 people died.

[lucky wilbury]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&u=/nm/20040517/ts_nm/iraq_sarin_dc_3&printer=1

U.S. Army Says It Finds Shell with Sarin Agent in Iraq

1 hour, 49 minutes ago Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!



BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A small amount of the nerve agent sarin was found in a shell that exploded in Iraq (news - web sites), the U.S. army said Monday in the first announcement of discovery of any of the weapons on which Washington made its case for war.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference the substance had been found in an artillery shell inside a bag discovered by a U.S. convoy a few days ago. The round had exploded, causing a small release of the substance, he said.

"The Iraq Survey Group has confirmed today that a 155 (mm) artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found. The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) that was discovered by a U.S. force convoy," he said.

"A detonation occurred before the IED be could be rendered inoperable," Kimmitt said, adding that two members of an explosives team had been treated for exposure to the substance.

Kimmitt said the round, designed to mix the sarin in flight, belonged to a class of ordnance that the ousted government of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) claimed to have destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war.

"It is 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... when it exploded it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it," he said.

IEDs are bombs usually planted at the side of the road to explode as coalition vehicles pass.

The United States launched its invasion of Iraq last year, accusing then-president Saddam Hussein of developing chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. Failure to find such weapons has stirred criticism in the United States and Britain, Washington's closest ally in the war.

[lucky wilbury]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html

Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq

Monday, May 17, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent (search) recently exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday.

Bush administration officials told Fox News that mustard gas (search) 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 (search), 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 (search) 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 (search). 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 (search) 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.

[lucky wilbury]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120268,00.html

Tests Confirm Sarin in Iraqi Artillery Shell

Tuesday, May 18, 2004
By Liza Porteus

NEW YORK — Tests of the artillery shell that detonated in Iraq on Saturday have confirmed that it did in fact contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly sarin (search) nerve agent, Defense officials told Fox News Tuesday.

The artillery shell was left as a roadside bomb, the U.S. military said Monday. Two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent when the 155-mm shell exploded before it could be rendered inoperable.

The soldiers displayed "classic" symptoms of sarin exposure — most notably dilated pupils and nausea, officials said. The symptoms ran their course fairly quickly, however, and as of Tuesday, the two had returned to duty.

A shell filled with mustard gas (search) that was part of an improvised explosive device (IED) was also discovered on May 2, Defense officials said.

That shell was found by passing soldiers in a median on a thoroughfare west of Baghdad. The most likely way it got there was that it was simply left there by someone, officials said, but it's unclear whether it was meant to be used as an IED.

Testing done by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) — a U.S.-organized group of weapons inspectors who have been searching for weapons of mass destruction (search) since the ouster of Saddam Hussein — concluded that the mustard gas was "stored improperly" and so the gas was rendered "ineffective."

"It's not out of the ordinary or unusual that you would find something [like these weapons] in a haphazard fashion" in Iraq, Edward Turzanski, a political and national security analyst, told Fox News on Tuesday. But "you have to be very careful not to be entirely dismissive of it … it remains to be seen whether they have more shells like this."

Iraq: A 'Bazaar of Weapons'

New weapons caches are being found every day, experts said, including "hundreds of thousands" of RPG rounds and man-portable air defense weapons used to shoot down coalition aircraft.

"Clearly if we're gonna find one or two of these every so often — used as an IED or some other way — the threat is not all that high but it does confirm suspicion that he did have this stuff," said Ret. U.S. Army Col. Robert Maginnis.

"It is a bazaar of weapons that are available on every marketplace throughout that country," Maginnis added. "We're doing everything we can to aggressively disarm these people but there were so many things that were stored away by Saddam Hussein in that country … it's a huge job that we're tackling."

Some are concerned that enemy fighters with access to potentially lethal weapons in a country full of stockpiles could mean more risk to coalition forces and Iraqis.

"What we don't know is if there are other shells, which there certainly could be," said Dennis Ross, a former ambassador and special Middle East coordinator and a Fox News foreign affairs analyst. "We also don't know whether or not these kind of shells could be used as explosives, which could have a more devastating effect on our troops."

But some experts say that the individual shells themselves don't pose a threat to the masses.

"I'm not as concerned they're going to use a lot of chemical munitions … they're not gonna use these as improvised explosive devices because they don't have a big blast associated with them, but they do combine those two compounds into the noxious sarin gas. But they can't do it all that well with a small explosive charge," Maginnis said.

"The reality is, they'd have to have a whole bunch of these things, have to find some way of blowing them with a large charge to even create a cloud."

But that doesn't mean insurgents won't find a better way to make the devices to create a more "terrorist-type of attack" against U.S. forces, Maginnis continued.

The task of military analysts in Baghdad is to determine how old the sarin shell is. A final determination will have a significant effect on how weapons researchers and inspectors proceed.

Some are suggesting that the unmarked shells found date back to the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s. The mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 projectiles for which Saddam failed to account for in his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Iraq also failed to then account for 450 aerial bombs with mustard gas.

It's not clear if enemy fighters simply found an old stockpile of weapons of if they knew what was inside.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reacted cautiously to the news of the discoveries.

"So what we have to then do is to try to track down and figure out how it might be there, what caused that to be there in this improvised explosive device, and what might it mean in terms of the risks to our forces," Rumsfeld said Monday.

Kurds: We Have Evidence of WMD

Many have no doubt similar substances will be found as the weapons hunt continues.

"We don't know where they are but we suspect they are hidden in many locations in Iraq ... it's quite possible that even the neighboring states who are against the reform of Iraq ... are helping the Saddamites in hiding," Howar Ziad, the Kurdish representative to the United Nations, told Fox News on Tuesday.

"As we know, the Baathist regime had a track record of using" these chemicals against people in Iraq, such as the Kurds, Ziad continued. "He's [Saddam] never kept any commitment he's ever made to the international committee nor to the people" to not use such deadly materials.

Saddam's regime used sarin in mass amounts during the Iraqi military's attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja (search) in 1988. More than 5,000 people are believed to have died in those attacks; more than 65,000 were injured. Sarin was also just one nerve agents used by the Iraqi Army against Iran during the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s.

Ziad said the United Nations, World Health Organization and others haven't "bothered" to travel to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq to see the effects sarin and other deadly agents have had on people firsthand and to get proof that Saddam did in fact possess such weapons.

"We have evidence — we have victims of the use of those agents and we're still waiting for WHO and the U.N. to come investigate," Ziad said.

[lucky wilbury]

bump

[Big Train]

They wanted to bury it Lucky

[Warham]

Hmmmmmmm.

[knuckleboner]

what for? did this prove saddam had WMD stocks?

not according to president bush and colin powell, who are still acknowledging intelligences miscues.

did saddam REALLY have large stocks of WMD around? eh...maybe.

but this incident isn't quite the ringing endorsement of it.

[lucky wilbury]

but it should tell you something though

[knuckleboner]

there's a lot of things that shell could've been.

i'll give you, in no way, does it mean that saddam was LESS likely to have kept something.

but to be honest, by itself, i don't think it really means much. which, i believe, is one reason the administration isn't talking about it, either.

[lucky wilbury]

it wasen't the only one found. dulfar has said they've made numorous dicoverios of shells. i'll see if i can find a thread on it.

[knuckleboner]

no need to trouble yourself, lucky. i remember the reports.

again, though, after all those reports, you still had colin powell and the administration talking about bad intel. the fact is, they pretty much said stockpiles of WMD.

most reasonable people will admit that saddam almost certainly broke the UN regulations in some manner.

but what we've found so far isn't quite the imminent threat that we claimed was the reason we needed to go to war.

[Phil theStalker]

Originally posted by Mr Grimsdale
'Nerve gas bomb' explodes in Iraq
An artillery shell containing a small amount of the nerve gas sarin has eapons plant.

The Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, also used the nerve agent in a Tokyo subway in 1995, in which 12 people died.

..and Grimmy is da sexpert



=PtS=

[Mr Grimsdale]

i need 100000000000 anti-personnel mines for a buyer in angola

there's 5% in it for anyone who can help