Russia Denies Involvement in Iraq Weapons

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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&u=/ap/20041028/ap_on_re_eu/russia_iraq_weapons&printer=1

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW - Russia angrily denied allegations Thursday that Russian forces had smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq (news - web sites) prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous."

"I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structures couldn't have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because all Russian military experts left Iraq when the international sanctions were introduced during the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites)," he told The Associated Press.

The denial followed a story in The Washington Times on Thursday that quoted a high-ranking U.S. defense official alleging that Russian special forces had "almost certainly" helped spirit out the hundreds of tons of high explosives that went missing from the al-Qaqaa base. The newspaper based its report on an interview with John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security.

Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency that 377 tons of explosives had vanished as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The compounds, HMX and RDX, are key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks.

Russia' charge d'affaires in Iraq, Ilya Morgunov, also denied the report.

"I didn't hear about any weapons to be taken out," Interfax quoted him as saying. "Moreover, there was nobody to take them out, because we actually evacuated all of our personnel."

He said there had been no Russian special forces in Iraq, only civilian specialists working for foreign firms.