- MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia
summoned a U.S. diplomat to protest at a Pentagon (news - web sites) claim
that Russian soldiers spirited away hundreds of tons of explosives from
a site in Iraq (news - web sites) just before the U.S. invasion, Interfax
news agency said on Friday.
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- The missing cache of explosives has become a political
hot potato in the U.S. election race, with Democratic challenger John Kerry
(news - web sites) accusing the administration of President Bush (news
- web sites) of failing to secure the site.
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- In a Washington Times story this week, Pentagon official
John Shaw pointed the finger at Russian special forces, saying they had
moved many of Iraq's weapons into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003
invasion.
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- "The Russian Ministry of Defense summoned the U.S.
military attache in Moscow to express a resolute protest in connection
with the comments by John Shaw," Interfax quoted an anonymous source
at a Russian defense agency as saying.
-
- A spokesman at the U.S. embassy in Moscow confirmed that
a member of the embassy's defense staff had been "called in,"
but denied it was the chief military attache and declined to say what had
been discussed at the meeting.
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- Russia's Defense Ministry dismissed the allegation that
there had been any Russian involvement in the disappearance of the explosives
in Iraq.
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- "You can't really take statements like this as anything
but far-fetched rubbish," said spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov.
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- "I can officially confirm that the Ministry of Defense
and the organizations that report to it could not have taken part in the
disappearance of the explosives, since Russia's servicemen and military
specialists left Iraq 12 years ago."
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- Bush and Pentagon officials have argued that Saddam Hussein
(news - web sites)'s government may have moved the explosives from the
Al Qaqaa storage site near Baghdad before the start of the war to protect
it from U.S. attack.
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- But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has distanced himself
from the comments by Shaw, who is deputy undersecretary for defense for
international technology security.
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