31 October 2004	Sunday	16 Ramazan 1425

MOSCOW, Oct 30: Russia summoned a US diplomat to protest at a Pentagon claim that Russian soldiers spirited away hundreds of tons of explosives from a site in Iraq just before the invasion, Interfax news agency said on Friday.

The missing cache of explosives has become a political hot potato in the US election race, with Democratic challenger John Kerry accusing the administration of President George W. Bush of failing to secure the site.

In a Washington Times story this week, Pentagon official John Shaw pointed the finger at Russian special forces, saying they had moved many of Iraq's weapons into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 invasion.

"The Russian Ministry of Defence summoned the US military attache in Moscow to express a resolute protest in connection with the comments by John Shaw," Interfax quoted an anonymous source at a Russian defence agency as saying.

A spokesman at the US embassy in Moscow confirmed that a member of the embassy's defence staff had been "called in", but denied it was the chief military attache and declined to say what had been discussed at the meeting.

Russia's Defence Ministry dismissed the allegation that there had been any Russian involvement in the disappearance of the explosives in Iraq.

"You can't really take statements like this as anything but far-fetched rubbish," said spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov.

"I can officially confirm that the Ministry of Defence and the organisations that report to it could not have taken part in the disappearance of the explosives, since Russia's servicemen and military specialists left Iraq 12 years ago."

Bush and Pentagon officials have argued that Saddam Hussein's government may have moved the explosives from the Al Qaqaa storage site near Baghdad before the start of the war to protect it from US attack.

But US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has distanced himself from the comments by Shaw, who is deputy undersecretary for defence for international technology security.

WARNINGS IGNORED: Human Rights Watch repeatedly gave US-led occupation forces in Iraq information about stockpiles of unsecured explosives and munitions in Iraq but coalition forces took little or no action to secure them, the group charged.

The New York-based rights watchdog said in May 2003 it had "provided US and British forces with specific data, including precise GPS coordinates, on unsecured weapons stockpiles around Baghdad and in Basra," in a statement released here Friday.

"While the US-led coalition deployed more than 1,000 people to search for weapons of mass destruction, they werent organized to neutralize the threat of conventional weapons right under their noses. Now Iraqi civilians are paying a deadly price for the failure to secure the vast weapon stocks in Iraq during the US-led invasion," the statement charged.

"Immediately after the fall of Baghdad, our researchers were finding massive stockpiles of weapons and explosives throughout Iraq," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "But when we informed coalition forces, they told us they just didnt have enough troops to secure these sites."

The Defense Department said Friday it believes high explosives at the center of a US election controversy were at the Al Qaqaa site in Iraq when US troops arrived but an officer said his unit had moved 250 tons to be destroyed.

The munitions have become a major topic of contention in the US election campaign, with Democratic White House contender John Kerry saying the loss of the explosive highlights mistakes made in Iraq by President George W. Bush.

The Pentagon had suggested the 380 tons of high explosives that the IAEA says vanished after the war was probably moved by Saddam Hussein's regime before US-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003.

But the airing of film taken by a US television crew on April 18, 2003, at Al Qaqaa has stepped up pressure on the US administration.

The film shows US soldiers cutting what appeared to be IAEA seals on bunkers and finding crates and boxes filled with suspected high explosives.-Reutrs / AFP