So when did the explosives disappear?

[Rex Kickass]

First US unit at Iraq site did not hunt explosives.

 

...Col. Dave Perkins, then the commander of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said the immediate concern when his troops reached the Al Qaqaa site on April 3, 2003, was to defeat a couple of hundred Iraqi troops who were firing from the compound as the Americans surged toward Baghdad.

 

...

 

Perkins also said it was "very highly improbable" that enemy forces could have trucked out such a huge amount of explosives in the weeks after U.S. forces first arrived there, considering the high level of U.S. military presence and how clogged the roads around the site were with U.S. convoys.

 

Bush, Kerry slug it out over missing Iraqi explosives.

 

A top Iraqi science official said Wednesday the 350 tonnes of high explosives could not have been smuggled out of the military site south of Baghdad before Saddam Hussein was ousted.

 

Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam, said "it is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall."

 

He said he and other officials had been ordered a month earlier to ensure that "not even a shred of paper left the sites."

 

"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."

 

The dump, Al-Qaqaa, is 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Baghdad.

 

The bulk of materials in question include HMX (high melting point explosive) and RDX (rapid detonation explosive), which can be used in major bombing attacks, making missile warheads and detonating nuclear weapons.