THE United Nations is in possession of a document, once snatched from the hands of a weapons inspector, that suggests Iraq might be hiding 6,000 poison gas bombs, The Times has learnt.

Iraq turned over the six-page document to UN weapons inspectors on November 30, but failed to account for the damaging information it contains in its 12,000-page arms declaration it submitted on December 7.

The so-called “Air Force document” is, therefore, emerging as a key piece of evidence in the detailed assessment of Iraq’s declaration that Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, is due to give to the UN Security Council on January 9.

“In their ‘currently accurate declaration’ they do not address unresolved issues from the past,” one source said. “If they gave an explanation for that document, they would have to give an explanation for the biological questions and the chemical questions and they do not want to do that at this point.”

The so-called “Air Force document” was seized by an Iraqi official from a UN inspector who found it at the Iraqi Air Force headquarters on July 18, 1998. The team, led by a female biological weapons expert attached to the UN from the German Ministry of Defence, found the file in a safe in an operations room at the heart of the building.

After consulting a superior, an Iraqi minder refused to allow the German inspector to copy the Arabic document, but not before she was able to jot down notes on what it disclosed.

The document lists the number of four types of “special” aerial bombs dropped by the Iraqi Air Force during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

The UN inspectors told the Security Council at the time that the inspector’s jotted notes “revealed serious discrepancies between Iraq’s declarations on the consumption of chemical bombs and the data copied from the document on the expenditure of these weapons”.

Of some 150,000 munitions that it had admitted filling with chemical weapons, Iraq claims that about 100,000 were “consumed” in the Iran-Iraq war. But a UN official told The Times yesterday that the Air Force document shows that 6,000 fewer 250kg and 500kg chemical bombs were used in the Iran-Iraq war than Baghdad claimed.

“It purports to show that Iraq dropped about 6,000 bombs less on the poor Iranians and, therefore, raises the question of what happened to these shells and do they still exist?” one UN official said.

For the past four years, the document had been kept in a safe at Iraq’s National Monitoring Directorate under UN seal until the two sides were able to agree to terms for inspectors to view it.

But Iraq voluntarily surrendered it on November 30 in the knowledge that UN inspectors would demand to see it under their tough new mandate.

Dr Blix has so far refused to use the document. But UN sources say that he is likely to cite it next month when he points out the omissions in the Iraqi declaration.

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