Commander says unit made no bunker inspection

The commander, Col Joseph Anderson, of the 2nd Brigade of the Army8217;s 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, known as Al Qaqaa, was considered highly sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited there shortly before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.

8216;8216;We happened to stumble on it,8217;8217; he said. 8216;8216;I didn8217;t know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission, it was not our focus we were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already.8217;8217;

What had been, for Anderson and his troops, an unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took on new significance this week, after The New York Times and the CBS News program 60 Minutes reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX and RDX, had disappeared since the American takeover.

Earlier this month, officials of the interim Iraqi government informed the United Nation8217;s International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives, the same kind used to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, disappeared sometime after the fall of the government of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, when American forces took over the country8217;s security. Al Qaqaa, which has been unguarded, was looted in the spring of 2003, and looters were seen there as recently as Saturday.

President Bush8217;s aides told reporters that because the soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives on April 10, the explosives could have been removed before the American invasion. They based their assertions on a report broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed video footage of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa.

By Tuesday afternoon, as Bush made his way through Wisconsin and Iowa, his aides had moderated their view, saying it was a 8216;8216;mystery8217;8217; when the explosives disappeared. They said that it could have happened before or after the invasion and that Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known.

At the Pentagon, a senior official, who asked not to be identified, acknowledged that the timing of the disappearance remained uncertain. 8216;8216;The bottom line is that there is still a lot that is not known,8217;8217; the official said.

The official suggested that the material could have vanished while Saddam was still in power, sometime between mid-March, when the international inspectors left, and April 3, when members of the Army8217;s 3rd Infantry Division fought with Iraqis inside Al Qaqaa. At the time, it was reported that those soldiers found a white powder that was tentatively identified as explosives. The facility was left unguarded, the official said. 8212;NYT