The head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency rejected on Thursday accusations that he sought to damage President George W Bush's reelection chances through his agency's report on a huge amount of missing explosives in Iraq.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the IAEA was preparing its scheduled six month report when it learned that 377 tons (342 tonnes) of explosives had gone missing from an Iraqi site which the US military had not secured. "On the 10th of October, I received a letter from the Iraqi government saying that there are 350 tons of high explosives that went missing," ElBaradei told an audience during a visit to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. "I realized, of course, that the timing is very unfortunate because I knew exactly the kind of reaction you would get from some of the media." |