Sarin-filled munitions in Iraq worry U.S.
From staff and wire reports

WASHINGTON — The small amount of deadly nerve agent sarin dispersed by a shell that exploded near a U.S. military convoy apparently was left over from Saddam Hussein's banned chemical arsenal built up two decades ago.

Two former weapons inspectors, Hans Blix and David Kay, said the shell probably was a stray weapon scavenged by militants. It likely does not signify that Iraq still had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, they said.

Kay, who led a U.S. team hunting for such weapons, said it appears the sarin shell was one of tens of thousands produced for the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The shells were banned by the United Nations after the first Gulf War, and Saddam said he had destroyed them all in the mid-1990s.

"It is hard to know if this is one that just was overlooked — and there were always some that were overlooked, we knew that — or if this was one that came from a hidden stockpile," Kay said. While the explosion demonstrates that Saddam hadn't complied fully with U.N. resolutions, Kay added, "It doesn't strike me as a big deal."