Possible evidence of Iraqi deception has been uncovered with the discovery of 11 mobile laboratories capable of biological and chemical uses buried south of Baghdad, a U.S. general said, according to CNN.
“Initial reports indicate that this is clearly a case of denial and deception on the part of the Iraqi government,” Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakley of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division told CNN. “These chemical labs are present, and now we just have to determine what in fact they were really being used for.”
 Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakley |
The troops found no chemical or biological weapons with the containerized labs, but soldiers recovered “about 1,000 pounds” of documents from inside the labs, which will be examined further, said Freakley.
U.S. officials have repeatedly accused Iraq of using mobile laboratories to produce banned weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell in February told the United Nations Security Council that U.S. intelligence indicated Iraq had production facilities for biological weapons “on wheels and on rails” and on at least 18 flatbed trucks.
Freakley said the laboratories – found near a weapons plant outside Karbala, about 50 miles south of Baghdad – were “clearly marked so they could be found again.” They appeared to contain about $1 million worth of equipment.
The 20-by-20-foot metal containers could be attached to semi-trailer trucks or railway cars, the general said.
In a Feb. 23 visit to an ammunition filling plant near the site, U.N. weapons inspectors “found nothing untoward,” a U.N. inspection team spokesman said today.
“There was no hint by anybody, no special tip that led us there,” one U.N. official said. “No banned weapons or related materials were found there.”
In his presentation to the U.N. Security Council, Powell insisted that the mobile labs existed and called them “most worrisome.”
“The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors,” Powell said. “In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.”
Powell cited four sources of evidence to back his assertion, including an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of the facilities and an Iraqi civil engineer “in a position to know the details of the program.”
However, U.N. weapons inspection chief Hans Blix said his inspectors never found evidence of such labs.
Blix told the U.N. Security Council on March 7, “Several inspections have taken place at declared and undeclared sites in relation to mobile production facilities. Food-testing mobile laboratories and mobile workshops have been seen, as well as large containers with seed-processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities have so far been found.”
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