Bomb in Iraq contained sarin agent, military says

A roadside bomb found in Baghdad contained a deadly nerve agent, the second time in 10 days, that U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction hidden since the fall of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The 155 mm artillery shell found Saturday that had been fashioned into a homemade bomb by Iraqi insurgents contained two chemicals that, when mixed, make the nerve agent sarin. Ten days earlier, a homemade device was found containing mustard agent.

The Iraq Survey Group, the joint CIA and military intelligence unit in Iraq, confirmed the presence of small amounts of sarin in the exploded shell, the U.S. military said last night.

The military said the bomb was evidence of banned weapons because Saddam’s regime “had declared all such rounds destroyed.”

“This is it,” said a defense official involved in monitoring Iraqi weapons.

The bomb was found early Saturday by U.S. military forces on a road near Baghdad International Airport after a soldier noticed a detonation cord sticking out of bomb placed along a road.

The bomb went off before it could be disarmed, and a liquid began seeping out of the remains of the artillery shell.

The liquid was determined in early tests to be one of two chemicals that when mixed together produce sarin — a poison that kills by disrupting the central nervous system.

The military described the artillery shell as “an old binary type that requires the mixing of two chemical components stored in separate sections of the shell.”

“For the deadly agent to be produced, the two components have to be mixed,” the military saz U.S. intelligence official said. “This is a very significant development and not only raises concerns about how many more might be out there but who has them.”

The official said it was too early to say whether the discovery of the sarin bomb and the mustard bomb on May 7 indicate that insurgents might be resorting to the use of chemical bombs against U.S. and allied forces.

It also was not clear, the official said, whether the insurgents who planted the bomb “knew it contained sarin,” because the shell did not have any special markings and the bomb was configured as if the shell contained conventional explosives.

Defense officials think Saddam hid chemical weapons with conventional arms in the widely dispersed ammunition dumps being found throughout Iraq.

About 8,700 weapons depots have been uncovered from the estimated 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of stored weapons. Many were looted by Iraqis immediately after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.

Hans Blix, a former U.N. weapons inspector, suggested that the sarin bomb is not evidence of large-scale hidden stockpiles, saying the sarin agent might have been a leftover shell from a chemical-arms dump.

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