Posted on 10/29/2004 3:22:17 PM PDT by focusandclarity
Report: Russia Took Iraqi Arms
Combined Reports A high-ranking U.S. defense official said Russian forces "almost certainly" smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, The Washington Times reported Thursday.
Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous."
The Washington Times, basing its report on an interview with John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian special forces had probably helped spirit out the hundreds of tons of high explosives that went missing from the al-Qaqaa base.
Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency that 342 tons of explosives had vanished as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The compounds, HMX and RDX, are key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks.
"I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structures couldn't have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because all Russian military experts left Iraq when the international sanctions were introduced during the 1991 Gulf War," Sedov said.
Russia's charge d'affaires in Iraq, Ilya Morgunov, also denied the report.
"I didn't hear about any weapons to be taken out," he was quoted by Interfax as saying. "Moreover, there was nobody to take them out, because we actually evacuated all of our personnel."
He said there had been no Russian special forces in Iraq, only civilian specialists working for foreign firms.
Visiting U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters in Moscow that he is unaware of any information suggesting Russia helped Saddam Hussein's government ship explosives out of Iraq.
Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst, said that some Russian military experts had worked in Iraq between the 1991 Gulf War and the U.S. invasion in March 2003, helping maintain Soviet-built weapons, but he voiced skepticism about the deployment of Russian troops to smuggle the explosives out of Iraq.
(AP, MT)
Russia is not our enemy France is!
If the Russians had anything to do with moving any of this material they would of used the Alpha Group to handle the job and then deny they had anything to do with it. Alpha is a private army made up of former Russian special forces.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.