Al Qa'qaa High Explosives Controversy - Claims of Removal Prior To US Arrival

Claims of Removal Prior To US Arrival

• "A U.S. Army officer came forward Friday, October 29, 2004 to say a team from his 3rd Infantry Division took about 250 tons of munitions and other material, including plastic explosives, from the Al-Qaqaa arms-storage facility 10 days after Saddam Hussein's regime fell in April 2003. According to ABC News, however, "the Pentagon stopped short of saying that the material that is reputed to be lost, missing, unaccounted for is the material that this exploitation team took away." (ABC World News Tonight, 31 October 2004).
• An aerial photograph declassified and released by Donald Rumsfeld showing two trucks at the site after IAEA inspectors last visited it before the invasion. However, the trucks in the photographs were not at any of the bunkers that had been identified as containing explosives. It has also been noted that they represent only a small fraction of the total shipping capacity required to move all the explosives.
• US Army Colonel David Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division which originally took the facility, and oversaw the area afterwards called the claim the explosives were taken after US troops were in the area "highly improbable". Perkins said that "that the enemy sneaks a convoy of 10-ton trucks in and loads them up in the dark of night and infiltrates them in your convoy and moves out", he said. "That's kind of a stretch too far."
• According to an NBC news crew embedded with the 101st, large stockpiles of conventional weapons were found on April 10, 2003, but not the 380 tons of HMX or RDX