Friday, Oct 29, 2004
Russia rejects U.S. charge
By Vladimir Radyuhin
MOSCOW, OCT. 28. Russia has angrily denied a Pentagon claim that its forces had removed nearly 380 tonnes of explosives missing in Iraq. A spokesman for the Russian Defence Ministry slammed the report as an "absurd concoction".
The Deputy Under-secretary of Defence, John Shaw, told Washington Times on Thursday that Russian special forces "almost certainly" had transported the explosives out of the country to Syria or Lebanon before the March 2003 U.S. invasion. The disappearance of 377 tonnes of explosives from the Al-Qaqaa military facility south of Baghdad was confirmed on Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"The Russian Ministry of Defence or its units could not have been involved in any way in the disappearance of the explosives since Russian military personnel had left Iraq long before the U.S.-British operation in that country," the Interfax news agency quoted the Defence Ministry spokesman, Leonid Sedov, as saying today.
The senior Pentagon official made his accusation against Russia a day after it called on the U.N. Security Council to return weapons inspectors to Iraq to investigate the loss of explosives. Washington rejected the demand, saying American inspectors were looking into the issue.
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