[AUSTRALIAN] Navy uncovers chemical plot

News.com.au ^ | April 6, 2003

[Sweet_Sunflower29]

AUSTRALIAN navy boarding teams have uncovered chilling evidence suggesting Iraqi soldiers may be plotting chemical attacks on shipping around Iraq's key port of Umm Qasr.

And it comes as coalition naval forces found what appeared to be an abandoned suicide boat packed with explosives and weapons on the banks of a key waterway near the port on Wednesday.

The highly-trained teams have found gas masks and diagrams detailing how to launch an attack from a small ship against a larger vessel.

The sketches, gas masks, several army uniforms and a machine gun were found in a secret observation post on an old wreck that suspected Iraqi soldiers had been using.

The observation post was secreted in the bridge of a sunken oil tanker which is protruding from the water from a key point in the Khawar Abd'Allah waterway - the main shipping channel to access the Umm Qasr port and also the route that humanitarian aid ships were expected to take.

The Khawar Abd'Allah waterway is littered with wrecks - many dating back to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and 1991 Gulf War.

Dotted in among the wrecks are unexploded mines as well as the possibility of Iraqi booby traps.

The boarding parties driving speedy rubber-hulled boats take few chances - wearing heavy body armour, carrying automatic weapons and treating each wreck search as though they were raiding a house in downtown Baghdad.

[Dark Wing]

ping

[Freedom'sWorthIt]

Awesome Aussies bump! Wow! Good work, Aussies!

[xm177e2]

I'm thinking the gas masks don't necessarily mean the soldiers were preparing for chemical warfare, but that they might have been something of a status symbol that elite Iraqi units liked to carry just to show how bad-ass they are. That would suggest the attack on the boats was being prepared by elite Iraqi units (or foreign terrorists, although this is less likely if my gas mask hypothesis is correct), and not regular guerillas or conventional military forces.

[mtbopfuyn]

Chilling.

[Enduring Freedom]

The Ba'th party members rarely took one.

Could the masks be to make close quarters bearable?

[txradioguy]

meanwhile at the U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix insisted that the latest finding still "didn't prove that Iraq was hiding any weapons of mass destruction." (sarcasm off)

[satchmodog9]

And the big three will report this when?