Militant Claim: We Have Explosives
An armed group claimed in a video Thursday to have obtained a large amount of explosives missing from a munitions depot facility in Iraq and threatened to use them against foreign troops.
A group calling itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade, said it had coordinated with officers and soldiers of "the American intelligence" to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqaa facility."
The claim couldn't be independently verified. The speaker was surrounded by masked, armed men standing in front of a black banner with the group's name on it in the tape obtained by Associated Press Television News.
"We promise God and the Iraqi people that we will use it against the occupation forces and those who cooperate with them in the event of these forces threatening any Iraqi city," the man added.
In other developments:
Nearly 400 tons of conventional explosives have disappeared from the al-Qaqaa facility south of Baghdad, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The U.N. agency's chief Mohamed ElBaradei, reported the disappearance to the U.N. Security Council on Monday, two weeks after Iraqi officials told the nuclear agency that 377 tons of explosives had vanished as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security."
Pentagon experts are suggesting the ordnance could have been moved before the United States invaded in March 2003.
An infantry commander said Wednesday it is "very highly improbable" that someone could have trucked out so much material once U.S. forces arrived in the area.
Col. David Perkins commanded the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, the division that led the charge into Baghdad. Those troops first captured the Iraqi weapons depot from which 377 tons of explosives disappeared.
Two major roads that pass near the Al-Qaqaa installation were filled with U.S. military traffic in the weeks after April 3, 2003, when U.S. troops first reached the area, the colonel said.
Perkins and others in the military acknowledged that some looting at the site had taken place. But he said a large-scale operation to remove the explosives using trucks almost certainly would have been detected.
The disappearance of the explosives has become a huge campaign issue in the U.S. presidential election.
Meanwhile, in another video aired Thursday by Al-Jazeera, Iraqi extremists showed what they said was a Polish woman hostage held in Iraq and demanded that Poland remove all its troops from Iraq.
The group, which called itself the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Fundamentalist Brigades, said the woman works with U.S. troops in Iraq. They also demanded the release of all Iraqi female prisoners.
A middle-aged woman with gray hair and dressed in a pink polka-dotted blouse sat in front of two masked gunmen, one of whom was pointing a pistol at her head. Her voice was not audible on the tape.
However, Al-Jazeera said the woman called on Polish troops to leave the country and for U.S. and Iraqi authorities to release all female detainees from the Abu Ghraib prison.
Ahmed al-Sheikh, Al-Jazeera's editor-in-chief, said the kidnappers did not mention a specific threat on the tape nor did they give a deadline for their demands to be met. He would not say when or how the station obtained the tape.
Poland commands some 6,000 troops from 15 nations — including some 2,400 from Poland — in the Babil, Karbala and Wasit provinces.
The armed group had also claimed responsibility in the September kidnapping of 10 Turkish hostages, who were released this month.
Late Wednesday, Al-Jazeera aired a video showing British aid worker Margaret Hassan, who again pleaded with Britain to withdraw its forces from Iraq even as some 800 British troops began deploying toward the Baghdad area, where they were expected to relieve U.S. troops who are being preparing for a major assault on insurgent areas west and north of the capital.
Hassan, 59, who ran CARE International's operations in Iraq, has been the most high-profile of foreign hostages abducted in Iraq. No group has claimed responsibility in her abduction.
She also asked for the release of female Iraqi detainees and the closure of CARE's operations in Iraq.
A day earlier, a militant Web site ran a claim by the al Qaeda-linked group led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi vowing to kill a 24-year-old Japanese hostage within 48 hours unless Japan withdrew its 500 troops from the country.
Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi swiftly refused the demand, saying he wouldn't give in to terrorists.