(The Age-Australia) Russell Skelton - A former Iraqi scientist now living in Melbourne claims to have had access to secret underground bunkers where chemical weapons were stored. "Maybe those weapons no longer exist, but I find it hard to believe they could disappear so easily," he says. Arrested by Saddam's security forces in 1998, he escaped to Syria when a high-ranking military officer and close friend bribed the guards. The scientist says he knows of five secret storage bunkers around Baghdad, Basra, and Tikrit, three of which he visited regularly as a senior employee of Iraq's now defunct Atomic Energy Commission. One was under an island in the Tigris River near Saddam University. Another was beneath the house of one of Saddam's cousins, and reached by a tunnel with a hidden entrance 800 meters away. "The lethal chemicals were stored in drums...there were also artillery shells and 122-millimeter rockets armed with chemicals."
2004-04-02 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive