US and British experts believe the only plausible use for a specially-equipped tractor trailer seized in northern Iraq last month was to produce biological weapons agents, a top Pentagon official said today.
Mr Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, stopped short of claiming that the tractor trailer was "smoking gun" proof that Iraq had an active weapons of mass destruction program.
Tests of surface areas in the trailer have not detected biological agents and the vehicle appears to have been scrubbed with a caustic ammonia-like chemical, he said.
But he said the tractor trailer was similar in configuration to mobile biological agent labs that US intelligence had learned about before the war from a mid-level Iraqi scientist.
It had a fermenter, gas cylinders to supply clean air for production and a system to capture and compress exhaust gas to elminate any telltale signature - a function not normally used for legimate biological processes, Mr Cambone said.
"So while some of the equipment on the trailer could have been used for purposes other than biological weapons agent production, US and UK technical experts have concluded that the unit does not appear to perform any function beyond what the defector said it was for, which was the production of biological agents," he said.
The tractor trailor was seized on April 19th at a Kurdish checkpoint in northern Iraq called Tall Kayf. Experts will now dismantle it to do more thorough tests.
AFP