Iraqi biological weapons program
Iraq's State Establishment for Pesticide Production (SEPP) also ordered culture media and incubators from Germany's Water Engineering Trading.
[6] Iraq's BW facilities included its main biowarfare research center at Salman Pak (just south of Baghdad), the main bioweapons production facility at Al Hakum (the "Single-Cell Protein Production Plant") and the viral biowarfare research site at Al Manal (the "Foot and Mouth Disease Center").
According to an article in the London Sunday Times: In one incident, Iranian prisoners of war are said to have been tied up and killed by bacteria from a shell detonated nearby.
In another experiment, 15 Kurdish prisoners were tied up in a field while shells containing camel pox, a mild virus, were dropped from a light aircraft.
The prisoners were secured to a bed in a purpose-built chamber, into which lethal agents, including anthrax, were sprayed from a high-velocity device mounted in the ceiling.
… The facility, which is understood to have been built by German engineers in the 1980s, has been at the centre of Iraq's experiments on "human guinea pigs" for more than 10 years, according to Israeli military sources.
Rihab al-Taha ("Dr. Germ"), educated at the University of East Anglia, was head of Iraq's military research and development institute.
[12] U.S. officials alleged that a third scientist — Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash ("Mrs. Anthrax", "Chemical Sally"), who was trained at the University of Missouri — helped to rebuild Iraq's BW program in the mid-1990s after the Gulf War.
Both al-Taha and Ammash were captured by U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but both were released in 2005 after they were among those an American-Iraqi board found to be no longer security threats.
It was revealed that the Iraqi program conducted basic research on B. anthracis, rotavirus, camelpox virus, aflatoxin, botulinum toxins, mycotoxins, and an anticrop agent (wheat cover smut).
A covert military research and development program continued for another four years, with the intent of resuming agent production and weapons manufacture after the end of UN sanctions.
[22] Basic infrastructure was preserved, and research on producing dried agent was conducted under the guise of biopesticide production at Al Hakum until its destruction by UNSCOM inspectors in 1996.
[23] The same year, operational portions of the facilities at Salman Pak and Al Manal were also supposedly destroyed, either by the Iraqis themselves or under direct UNSCOM supervision.
Current information indicates the discovery of a clandestine network of biological laboratories operated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat), a prison laboratory complex possibly used for human experimentation, an Iraqi scientist's private culture collection with a strain of possible BW interest, and new research activities involving Brucella and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus.
[25] Other conclusions were that the Mukhabarat continued to investigate toxins as tools of assassination, concealed its program from UNSCOM inspectors after the 1991 war, and reportedly conducted lethal human experimentation until 1994.
