Suspected Chemical Facility Discovered

U.S. troops raided a suspected insurgent chemical weapons factory in northern Iraq, finding about 1,500 gallons of dangerous substances, the U.S. military said Saturday.

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a military spokesman, said that the 11 chemicals found in Mosul “are dangerous by themselves, and mixed together they would become even more dangerous.”

“Our feeling at this point is that had this stuff been mixed and used, it could have been very easily used against Iraqi and coalition forces,” Boylan said.

The military cautioned in a statement, however, that testing at the facility so far was “insufficient to determine what the insurgents had been producing” and that further tests were required.

U.S. troops, acting on a tip from detainees under interrogation, raided the building Tuesday, the statement said. The military did not say whether anyone was detained in the raid and said it was trying to determine who was operating the facility.

The military previously had found many suspected chemical sites, none of which ended up containing chemical or biological weapons. Tests at such sites can take several days.

Boylan said the materials did not appear to be linked to Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime. U.S. arms investigators have said there is evidence that Iraqi resistance groups had tried to manufacture chemical weapons. The information was disclosed last fall in the final CIA report by Charles A. Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, which failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In November, U.S. and Iraqi forces that overran Fallouja reported finding an insurgent lab that included the poisonous industrial compound hydrogen cyanide and instructions for making chemical weapons.