Global Security Newswire

Monitors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons are due to travel to Libya in the coming weeks to examine recently discovered chemical weapon caches never declared to the international community by the recently toppled Qadhafi regime, Agence France-Presse reported on Thursday (see GSN, Nov. 4).

Deceased dictator Muammar Qadhafi declared an arsenal of approximately 25 metric tons of mustard blister agent and 1,400 metric tons of precursor materials in 2004 under an agreement reached with Western governments to shutter his weapons of mass destruction programs. But Libyan opposition fighters have announced the discovery of two chemical arms storage sites never previously declared to the organization that oversees implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan said Libya's interim government must make a formal declaration on the two new chemical sites. "They have provided general descriptive information of what is there," Luhan said.

He applauded the Transitional National Council for having "proactively and very quickly brought the existence of these two undisclosed stockpiles to the attention of the international community."

The chemical weapons monitoring regime would like to have inspectors in the North African state "in the next three or four weeks" to examine the two new storage sites, he said.

"We also hope to keep a small group of inspectors on the ground, to liaise with the government on security arrangements," Luhan said.

The Hague-based organization dispatched monitors to Libya last week to verify that the nation's declared chemical warfare materials were secure and undisturbed. At the time that fighting broke out in February, Libya still possessed 11.5 metric tons of declared mustard gas and 844 tons of declared precursor agent that had yet to be destroyed, according to OPCW-provided figures. Previous estimates said the state had only 9.5 metric tons of blister agent left.

Luhan said the known chemical agent storage depot at Ruwagha was "in order."

"Those stockpiles remain in place. There had been no tampering, no diversions despite the emergency and the insecurity."

Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States have each said they would make available to Tripoli their technical expertise in the disposal of the remaining chemical warfare materials.

Chemical Weapons Convention member states "have had different kinds of forces on the ground and they have been focused on certain things such as keeping eyes in the sky on the chemical weapons out on the desert, making sure there is a semblance of security," Luhan said.

Once all the chemical weapons have been examined, the monitor agency will establish a new time table for Tripoli to eradicate all of the chemical agent, the spokesman said.

The organization "will set what we feel would be a reasonable deadline, to keep pressure on the government to address this but also give enough latitude as it is becoming a new government," Luhan said (Agence France-Presse/Google News, Nov. 10).