According to the Associated Press, the mystery of Iraq's missing anthrax may have been solved. Both the U.N. and various nations' inelligence agencies had been puzzled by what happened to approximately 1,800 gallons of anthrax that Saddam's regime produced, but never accounted for. Prior to the Iraq war, it was widely believed that the regime retained some or all of this material. The AP reports:

[T]he mystery of the missing anthrax appears to have been resolved in a little-noted section of the Iraq Survey Group report, a 350,000-word document issued Oct. 6.

The British-educated [Rihab Rashid] Taha, who ran the Hakam complex in the 1980s, told interrogators her staff carted off anthrax from Hakam in April 1991 and stored it in a bungalow near the presidential palace at Radwaniyah, 20 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. teams report.
    
Later that year, the crew dumped the chemically deactivated anthrax on grounds surrounded by a Special Republican Guard barracks near the palace, the report says.
    
Australian microbiologist Rod Barton, who took part in Iraq Survey Group interrogations, said in a recent Australian Broadcasting Corp. interview that the disposal was carried out in July 1991, when Iraqi orders were issued to destroy all bioweapons agents immediately. Then, through the years, Mrs. Taha and other Iraqi officials denied the "missing" anthrax ever existed.
    
"The members of the program were too fearful to tell the regime that they had dumped deactivated anthrax within sight of one of the principal presidential palaces," the Iraq Survey Group says.

I haven't had time to go back and check the ISG report, and from the AP account it isn't clear whether Saddam didn't know that the anthrax had been destroyed, or just didn't know that it had been dumped near one of his palaces. But it sounds like the former.

Posted by John at 06:58 AM  |    |  

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