Reuters Posted online: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 at 1550 hours IST
Vienna, June 4: A team of seven inspectors from the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency left for Iraq via Kuwait on Wednesday to conduct a limited probe into reports of looting at Iraq's main nuclear facility.
The International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) task will be to determine how much nuclear material was looted from a storage site near the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center after the war.
But the United States, as the occupying power in Iraq, has limited their mission to counting missing containers of radioactive material and repackaging spilled material. They will not measure environmental contamination or look into reports of radiation sickness among nearby residents.
The team is barred from entering the main Tuwaitha complex and will have no access to six other nuclear sites in Iraq that were allegedly looted in the post-war chaos.
The United States only agreed to let the agency back into Iraq after repeated warnings by IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei. He said a radiological and humanitarian emergency was brewing after residents allegedly emptied containers of uranium on the ground and took the barrels to use at home.
"We don't want nuclear material anywhere lying around. We want to make sure it does not fall into the wrong hands," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told reporters at Vienna airport.
The IAEA investigation will be confined to "Location C," the storage depot outside the Tuwaitha complex.
The IAEA team will arrive in Kuwait later on Wednesday and will head to Iraq on Friday.
There were over 500 tons of natural uranium and 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium stored at Tuwaitha, as well as smaller amounts of highly radioactive caesium, cobalt and strontium.
Caesium 137 is a highly radioactive powder that would be especially dangerous if used in a so-called "dirty bomb." In 1987, a canister of caesium powder found in a Brazil junkyard exposed 249 people to radiation, killing four.
