The police and the F.B.I. removed a container of phosgene, a chemical agent, from a United Nations office Thursday.
No unconventional weapons were found in Iraq after the United States-led invasion in 2003. But a potentially deadly chemical agent produced by Saddam Hussein’s regime has turned up, improbably, in an office at the United Nations in New York, and it had the F.B.I. and the city police scrambling yesterday.
City Room Blog
Federal, city and United Nations officials said the small quantity of the chemical, phosgene, was contained and appeared to pose no immediate danger. But unanswered questions about its risks and about how material from Iraq’s notorious chemical warfare center wound up in New York swirled all the way up to the State Department, the Senate and the White House yesterday.
And nobody was taking any chances.
A joint hazardous-materials team from the F.B.I. and the Police Department descended on the offices of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission at 866 United Nations Plaza, at 48th Street, a block north of the world body’s East Side headquarters, and removed the material for safekeeping and analysis.
The air in the offices also was tested, using chemical weapons detection equipment, and no toxic vapors were found and no evacuation was necessary, said Marie Okabe, a deputy spokeswoman for the United Nations. “There is no immediate risk or danger,” Ms. Okabe said. “Unmovic staff are still working on the premises.”
Ms. Okabe said that a United Nations investigation, in conjunction with the F.B.I., was under way to determine how the potentially hazardous chemical came to be there and how it had gone unnoticed for more than a decade in New York.
The chemical believed to be phosgene, an old-generation nerve-gas component used extensively in the later stages of World War I and in Iraqi attacks that killed thousands of Kurds in the late 1980s, was discovered in a steel box last Friday by personnel cleaning out files and old boxes in a weapons inspection agency that is to be closed soon, said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the agency.
The substance, a colorless liquid suspended in oil in a container the size of a soda can that was sealed in a plastic bag, was unmarked except for an inventory number, and nobody knew what it was, Mr. Buchanan said. A check of records indicated that the chemical was phosgene that had been taken by United Nations inspectors in 1996 from Iraq’s chemical weapons facility at Al Muthanna, near Samarra.
Tiny quantities of a second chemical, sealed in glass tubes about the size of a pen, were identified as nuclear magnetic resonance materials, which are used to calibrate chemical analysis equipment, according to United Nations officials. It was unclear yesterday if this chemical posed any danger.
The inspection agency has 1,400 linear feet of inventory files and it was not until Wednesday — five days after the discovery — that United Nations officials found the inventory number and learned that what they apparently had was Iraqi phosgene, a volatile, highly poisonous chemical made of carbon monoxide and chlorine that in gas or liquid form can severely damage the skin, eyes, nose, throat and lungs or even kill victims.
And it was not until late Wednesday that the State Department was notified. Word was passed then to the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department, which took action yesterday. Even as the joint hazardous-materials squad went to the United Nations to secure the chemicals, questions about a mysterious “nerve gas” in New York City were popping up at the White House and the State Department.
President Bush’s spokesman, Tony Snow, said at a White House press briefing that the materials had been brought in by United Nations weapons inspectors long ago, and should have been sent to a laboratory.
“These items should not have ended up, obviously, at the New York offices,” Mr. Snow said. “Normally they would be transported to an appropriately equipped laboratory for analysis. I’m sure that there are going to be a lot of red-faced people over at the U.N. trying to figure out how they got there.”
At the State Department, Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman, noted that the United Nations Security Council had decided to shut down the inspection agency that dealt with weapons issues in Iraq. Mr. Casey also said the chemicals did not appear to pose any hazard. He said an investigation by the United Nations and the F.B.I. would look into “why these items were there, why they were there for so long, and verify that there are no other outstanding issues related to it.”
The United Nations pulled its inspectors out of Iraq just before the American-led invasion in March 2003, leaving the search for unconventional weapons and the responsibility for disarming Iraq to the United States and Britain. A few months later, the Security Council voted to shut down Unmovic and remove its inspectors.
While no unconventional weapons were found, Iraq under Saddam Hussein had extensively developed chemical weapons; phosgene and mustard gas were used in attacks against the Kurds directed by Mr. Hussein’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing villages in northern Iraq.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, spoke yesterday of a “potentially fatal chemical” at the United Nations. “The U.N. should know it’s a target,” he said. “They need to be even more careful than anyone else. The fact that a container of deadly poison from Iraq was found at the U.N. is a wake-up call that they better start living up to the higher safety standards of a post 9/11 New York.”
Normally, chemicals taken from Iraq should have been taken directly by military transport to the Edgewood Laboratories in Maryland for analysis, and not brought to the United Nations headquarters, according to Ms. Okabe.
Mr. Buchanan said the chemicals were found in a steel box 2 feet by 3 feet by 18 inches in a third-floor office of the inspection agency last Friday. There were no labels or markings other than a set of inventory numbers, he said.
“It may turn out to be nothing, but to be on the safe side we have to consider the worst-case scenario,” Mr. Buchanan said. In any case, he agreed that the discovery was bizarre. Dangerous materials, he said, “shouldn’t have come here,” adding: “We don’t have any analytical capability.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/nyregion/31un.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
No comments:
Post a Comment