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| Iraq |
| Guards Foil Plot to Sabotage Iraqi Refinery |
| 2004-01-21 |
| EFL: When guards at an oil refinery seized a group of intruders last weekend, they thought they had snared thieves. A search, however, turned up more than 80 containers of explosives, suggesting a planned attack that could have crippled the facility and disrupted energy supplies to millions of people in the Iraqi capital. Officials at Baghdad’s Doura refinery told The Associated Press that four intruders were preparing two tons of explosives for an attack on the refinery’s fuel depot or the boilers that help power the plant. A successful strike could have knocked out half of Doura’s production for at least a year, said the facility’s general manager, Dathar al-Khashab. That would have been a bad thing. A series of attacks months ago forced authorities to shut down the export pipeline built to carry crude from northern Iraq to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The pipeline’s continued closure has constrained oil production at northern oil fields and left the country with a single export route, a southern pipeline to the Persian Gulf. The discovery of a bomb at a pipeline leading to a refinery in Beiji, 125 miles north of Baghdad, forced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Tuesday to halt repairs on a corroded section of the pipe. Most oil-related attacks have occurred within 30 miles of Beiji, said Robert McKee, oil adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. Attackers don’t want to commute very far? The number of attacks peaked at 16 in October and dropped to four last month - a decline that accompanied deployment of the first of some 14,000 oil industry guards. "It’s a very heavy physical presence with an Iraqi face," said the project’s commander, Army Col. Tom O’Donnell. A British security firm, Erinys International Ltd., is training the guards and expects to complete the deployment by the end of next month. Last autumn, saboteurs fired mortars and machine guns nightly at an oil depot in the town of Latifiyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad. The attacks prevented the depot from operating for over 10 hours a day. After Erinys hired hundreds of guards from three villages in the area, the number of attacks there dwindled to zero, and the depot is now open around the clock, O’Donnell said. "I asked, ’Why do you think there haven’t been any attacks in the past few weeks.’ And the guards told me - this is no lie - ’Because I live there. They’re not going to shoot me,’" he said. Most likely related to each other. Politically motivated insurgents, many of whom are believed to be foreigners, present a tougher challenge, and some Iraqi oil officials advocate using force to subdue them. Two of the four would-be saboteurs at the Doura refinery spoke with Egyptian accents, security guards said. Outsiders don’t care how many Iraqis they kill. Security guards and police at Doura caught three men Saturday trying to flee across a scrub-covered field next to the refinery. A fourth intruder escaped but was captured the next day. When a search of the field turned up canisters of explosives camouflaged by sticks and dead grass, they realized that these ordinary-looking strangers posed an extraordinary threat. The cache was four times the size of the charge that blew up outside coalition headquarters. Officials believe the intruders had concealed the munitions and planned to load them on a vehicle and sneak them into the refinery complex. The attack might have succeeded, if not for vigilant guards in a watch tower built just six weeks before. Good work, guys. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #1 Give them a fair trial then attach them to some of the charges and light the candle. |
| Posted by: Anonymous2u 2004-1-21 8:56:15 PM |