Sealed chemicals found at U.N. office

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NEW YORK — U.N. weapons inspectors stumbled upon small amounts of "potentially hazardous" chemicals in their offices today and called the FBI to help remove them.

The discovery posed no immediate danger, and no evacuation was necessary, U.N. officials said.

Small vials and tubes contained the choking agent phosgene, a chemical that gained notoriety for its use as a weapon during World War I.

Other chemicals may have been present in a steel box that was discovered by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) as staffers were sorting through storage trunks.

The box containing the sealed vials and tubes probably was shipped from Baghdad around 1996 and had been sitting unopened in the commission's offices, located until recently on the 30th floor of the U.N. headquarters, a commission official said.

"This stuff was all sealed and wrapped, yeah? We're not crazy," said spokesman Ewen Buchanan.

"But it should not have been here. This is a violation of our own procedures. We had the capability to handle this kind of thing in Baghdad but not in our offices here."

The FBI was called immediately, and a specialized hazardous-materials team removed the packages early this afternoon.

The monitoring and inspection commission is the successor agency to the United Nations Special Commission, which was created by the U.N. Security Council after the first Gulf war to search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

In the 1990s, special commission inspectors uncovered undeclared banned weapons programs, including a biological warfare program that Saddam sought to conceal; the chemical nerve agent VX; and other advanced chemical weapons capabilities.

They also discovered the indigenous production of long-range ballistic missile engines and a covert program to enrich uranium.

Inspectors from the successor agency, UNMOVIC, searched for weapons of mass destruction prior to the Iraq war and came up empty-handed.

The U.N. Security Council agreed a few months ago to end UNMOVIC's mandate and wind down its activities.