Chemical substance found in U.N. office
The substance was supposed to be shipped to a chemical laboratory, police said.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — 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 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.
Substance removed
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 the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission’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 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 response
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.”
A U.N. chemical weapons expert, Svetlana Utkina, 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.