UNITED NATIONS – In a story dated Aug. 30, 2007 about U.N. weapons inspectors finding the potentially hazardous phosgene chemical in their offices, The Associated Press erroneously identified Svetlana Utkina as a U.N. chemical weapons expert. Utkina worked for the U.N. commission investigating chemical weapons in Iraq as a planning and operations officer and spoke at a press conference about the gas phosgene, but she was not employed by the U.N. as a chemical weapons expert.
A corrected version of the story is below:
U.N. weapons inspectors find potentially hazardous phosgene chemical in office
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer
U.N. weapons inspectors discovered a potentially hazardous chemical warfare agent that was taken from an Iraqi chemical weapons facility 11 years ago and mistakenly stored in their offices in the heart of midtown Manhattan all that time, officials said Thursday.
The material — identified in inventory files as phosgene, a chemical substance used in World War I weapons — was discovered Aug. 24. It was only identified on Wednesday because it was marked simply with an inventory number, and officials had to check the many records in their vast archives, said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. inspection agency.
U.N. and U.S. officials said the material posed no threat to anyone's health or safety.
A team of hazardous materials experts from the FBI and New York City police removed the substance from the office on Manhattan's east side, about a block north of U.N. headquarters, in three steel containers. The containers were flown to a military facility in Aberdeen, Md., for disposal, U.N. officials said.
While the disposal team was in UNMOVIC's sixth-floor office, its small staff was evacuated along with other tenants from that floor, Buchanan said.
When the material was discovered in a shipping container last week, Buchanan said U.N. experts followed their established procedure in dealing with unknown material — putting the material in double zip-locked plastic bags, and securing it in a safe in a room that is double-locked.
U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said the staff continued to work in the offices of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, which are in the process of being shut down.
Tests conducted by U.N. personnel found no toxic vapors in the area where the material had been stored, police said. The materials had been in UNMOVIC and its predecessor inspection agency, UNSCOM, apparently since 1996 when they were inadvertently shipped to U.N. administrative offices instead of a chemical laboratory, police said.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said the suspected chemical agent should have been transported to an appropriately equipped lab for analysis.
"I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of red-faced people over at the U.N. trying to figure out how they got there," Snow said.
Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, said the U.N. needs to be more careful because "it's a target."
"The fact that a container of deadly poison from Iraq was found at the U.N. is a wake-up call that they better start living up to the higher safety standards of a post 9-11 New York," he said in a statement.
Phosgene can be used as a chemical weapon, and was used extensively in World War I as a choking agent. Both phosgene gas and liquid can damage skin, eyes, nose, throat and lungs.
Buchanan said the phosgene was in liquid form, suspended in oil, in a soda-can-sized container that was sealed in a plastic bag.
Okabe said the chemical state of the phosgene was unknown but "could be potentially hazardous."
Svetlana Utkina, a planning and operations officer at UNMOVIC, said phosgene is toxic and would cause a person's lungs to collapse if it was inhaled. She said a container the size of a soda can would likely not contain more than gram quantities of the substance.
Still, if it was opened and did contain phosgene, she said "probably about five people will get severe problems, (and a) couple of people will be dead."
The inventory records indicated the material was from a 1996 excavation of the bombed-out research and development building at Iraq's main chemical weapons facility at Muthana, near Samarra. The entire facility was extensively bombed during the 1991 Gulf War, Buchanan said.
UNMOVIC has 1,400 linear feet of paper files — 125 five-drawer cabinets — and it took until Wednesday to find the inventory matching the number on the package with the suspected phosgene, Buchanan said.
The agency and its archives — including the suspect material — had been in an office at U.N. headquarters until moving to its current site about three years ago, he said.
Also found at the UNMOVIC office was a second sealed package containing tiny samples of chemical agents in sealed glass tubes shaped like pens, Buchanan said. Each of these tubes contained less than a gram of the material, he added.
Okabe said the U.N. has launched an investigation to determine how and why the material was in UNMOVIC files. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon notified the Security Council, she added.
The State Department said it had learned of the discovery late Wednesday and had immediately contacted the FBI to deal with the disposal.
Deputy spokesman Tom Casey also said a joint U.S.-U.N. investigation would be conducted into why the samples had been stored in the office but stressed that the chemicals had been there for at least a decade and did not pose any health risk.
"One of the things we want to do is make sure that the U.N., working with the FBI, does conduct a full investigation of this, so we're absolutely certain how they in fact got there, how long they were there, and the kind of exact nature of how this came about," he told reporters.
"There is no threat that these items currently or in the past have posed to public health and safety in the area," Casey said.
U.N. inspectors pulled out of Iraq just before the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and were barred by the U.S. from returning. The U.S. and Britain said they were taking over responsibility for Iraq's disarmament. In June 2003, the Security Council voted to shut down UNMOVIC and the U.N. nuclear inspection operation in Iraq.
Brian Mullady, a senior UNMOVIC official, told reporters that the staff did an immediate sweep of the rest of its archives to see if there were any more "surprises," but there was none.
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Associated Press Writer Tom Hays contributed to this story from New York.
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