Libya admits to stockpiling

[Ironfocus]

05/03/2004 The Hague, Netherlands - Libya acknowledged stockpiling 20 000kg of mustard gas and disclosed the location of a chemical weapons production plant in a declaration submitted on Friday to a chemical weapons watchdog organisation.

Libyan colonel Mohamed Abu Al Huda handed over 14 file cartons disclosing Libya's chemical weapons programme to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said Rogelio Pfirter, the director general of the organisation.

The Hague-based OPCW oversees compliance with the international treaty banning chemical weapons, which Libya joined last month.

Libya also declared thousands of tons of precursors that could be used to make sarin nerve gas, and two storage facilities, Pfirter said. The production and storage facilities were near Tripoli and in the south of the country, he added.

Eliminating

The declaration was a major step in Libya's eliminating of its weapons of mass destruction, which it unexpectedly promised last December that it would do, hoping to end international isolation and restore relations with the United States.

In addition to co-operating with the OPCW, Libya is also working with inspectors from the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency to eliminate its nuclear weapons programmes.

On Thursday, the White House lifted the ban on Americans travelling to Libya and said it would expand the US diplomatic presence in Tripoli. It also said US companies that were in Libya before the sanctions can begin negotiating their return, pending the end of sanctions.

Pfirter said the documents handed over by Libya "will allow us to certify that everything declared there will be destroyed and will never be used for any other purpose".

In the past week, Libya made the first concrete move to eliminate its stockpiles when it destroyed 3&bsp;300 aerial bombs specifically intended to carry chemical payloads.

With international inspectors monitoring the weeklong operation, bulldozers crushed the shell casings to complete the process, which ended on Wednesday, the OPCW said.

Pfirter praised Libya's cooperation with the OPCW after it ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in January.

"Not only have they joined the convention, they have been consistent in complying with it in a dynamic form. They have made an enormous effort," Pfirter said.

Pfirter said the Libyan development programme and the production of potential weapons ended in the early 1990s, and the mustard gas had not been weaponised. "They were tested but not used," he said.

More than 160 countries are members of the treaty, including the world's largest possessors of chemical weapons, the United States and Russia. Only a few major countries, including Angola, North Korea, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, and Syria, have yet to join.