Greenpeace urges UN to track down nuclear material looted in Iraq

VIENNA (AFP) Aug 03, 2004
The environmental group Greenpeace has urged the UN nuclear watchdog to track radioactive material missing from the looted Tuwaitha facility in Iraq to ensure it does not fall into the hands of terrorists.

Greenpeace said in a letter to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), acknowledged by the Vienna-based body on Tuesday, that a mission it sent to Iraq a year ago found radioactive material in communities living near Tuwaitha.

It was sent to IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei last week as UN inspectors were preparing to return to Iraq for the first time since the war, at the invitation of the new Iraqi government.

"During the upcoming inspection, the IAEA team must identify the radioisotopes and other dangerous materials still missing," Greenpeace said, adding that it should determine how much material could have found its way "onto the black market."

The United States revealed on July 6 that it had removed more than 1.7 tonnes of radioactive materials from Iraq that could be used to manufacture a "dirty" radiological bomb or support a nuclear weapons programme.

Greenpeace said the IAEA had to obtain an exhaustive list of what the United States airlifted from Iraq in the aftermath of the war, and compare that to pre-war inventories in order to see what could remain inside communities or have fallen into the wrong hands.

"When it comes to the possibility of loose nukes and terrorists building so-called dirty bombs, US assurances that 'roughly' 1,000 highly radioactive sources had been taken out of harms way are simply not good enough."

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said Tuesday that ElBaradei was studying Greenpeace's requests.

She said the IAEA would for security reasons not give the exact date its inspectors, who left Iraq just before the US-led war in March 2003, were due to begin their mission.

Their work is not centred on Tuwaitha, which suffered extensive looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein, but rather meant to be a routine mission to check nuclear sites already under IAEA safeguards, she added.

ElBaradei has described the return of inspectors to Iraq as "an absolute necessity" to draft a final report on the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in order to allow the international community to lift remaining sanctions of Iraq.

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