UN nuclear inspectors head to Iraq over looting
( 2003-06-05 09:29) (7)
A team of seven inspectors from the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency arrived in Kuwait on Wednesday, en route to Iraq to conduct a limited probe into reports of looting at Iraq's main nuclear facility.
The International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) task will be to determine how much nuclear material was looted from a storage site near the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center after the war.
But the United States, as the occupying power in Iraq, has limited their mission to counting missing containers of radioactive material and repackaging spilled material. They will not measure environmental contamination or look into reports of radiation sickness among nearby residents.
The team is also barred from entering the main Tuwaitha complex and will have no access to six other nuclear sites in Iraq that were allegedly looted in the post-war chaos.
"We have been assured by the United States that the other radioactive sources in Iraq would be secure," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told reporters at Vienna airport.
The United States has resisted any dominant U.N. role in post-war Iraq and took over the search for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction from U.N. weapons inspectors, who left Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion on March 20.
The IAEA team arrived in Kuwait late on Wednesday and will continue their trip to Iraq on Friday. The IAEA says the entire mission should take around two weeks.
More than 500 tons of natural uranium and 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium were stored at Tuwaitha, as well as smaller amounts of highly radioactive caesium, cobalt and strontium.
The United States agreed to let the IAEA back into Iraq after its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, said a radiological and humanitarian emergency was brewing after residents allegedly emptied containers of uranium and took the barrels home.
Angry locals said their children had fallen ill after wearing clothes washed in the barrels once used to store processed uranium. Some families had stored food in the barrels, which were sold to them by looters, residents said.
Caesium 137 is a highly radioactive powder that would be especially dangerous if used in a so-called dirty bomb. In 1987, a canister of caesium powder found in a Brazil junkyard exposed 249 people to radiation, killing four.
"We don't want nuclear material anywhere lying around. We want to make sure it does not fall into the wrong hands," Fleming said.
Much of the material at Tuwaitha had been gathering dust under U.N. seal for more than a decade before looters allegedly began ripping open barrels of radioactive material.
This is only the second time IAEA seals have been disturbed. The first time was in December 2002, when North Korea removed all IAEA seals and monitoring equipment at its nuclear facilities and expelled IAEA inspectors from the country.
The U.N. inspectors' return is unrelated to the pre-war weapons inspections mandated by the Security Council. Fleming said it was unclear if the IAEA would ever return to Iraq as arms inspectors.
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