Chemical war agent found in UN office

The material has been in the offices of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, apparently since 1996, when it was inadvertently shipped to UN administrative offices, instead of a chemical laboratory, police said.

A team of hazardous materials specialists from the FBI and the New York City police went to the office on Manhattan's east side, about a block north of UN headquarters, yesterday with two steel containers to remove the material and take it to a military facility outside New York for disposal, officials said.

While the disposal team was in UNMOVIC's sixth-floor office, its small staff was evacuated along with other tenants from that floor, Buchanan said.

When the material was discovered in a shipping container last week, Buchanan said, UN specialists followed their established procedure in dealing with unknown substances - putting it in double zipper-lock plastic bags and securing it in a safe in a room that is double-locked.

Marie Okabe, UN deputy spokeswoman, said that there was no danger to the public and that staff continued to work in UNMOVIC offices. The United Nations called in US authorities to remove the material, she said.

Tests conducted by UN personnel found no toxic vapors in the area where the material had been stored, police said.

Tony Snow, White House spokesman, said the chemical agents should have been transported to an appropriately equipped lab for analysis.

"I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of red-faced people over at the UN trying to figure out how they got there," Snow said.

Okabe said the chemical state of the phosgene was unknown but "could be potentially hazardous."

Buchanan said the phosgene was in liquid form, suspended in oil, in a soda-can-size container that was sealed in a plastic bag.

Records indicated that the material was from a 1996 excavation of the bombed-out research and development building at Iraq's main chemical weapons facility at Muthana, near Samarra. The facility was extensively bombed during the 1991 Gulf War, Buchanan said.