Video shows explosives went missing after war

The disappearance of the hundreds of tons of explosives from the Al Qaqaa storage facility near Baghdad has become a hotly contested issue in the US presidential campaign.

Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry has charged that President Bush's administration blundered by failing to safeguard the powerful conventional explosives.

Bush countered that Kerry was making wild accusations without knowing the facts. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday advanced the administration's argument that the explosives may have been gone by the time US forces got there.

Without mentioning Kerry by name, Rumsfeld told a radio interviewer, "People who use hair-trigger judgment to come to conclusions about things that are fast-moving frequently make mistakes that are awkward and embarrassing."

Meanwhile, Russia summoned a US diplomat to protest at a Pentagon claim that Russian soldiers spirited away hundreds of tons of explosives from a site in Iraq just before the US invasion, Interfax news agency said yesterday.

The missing cache of explosives has become a political hot potato in the US election race, with Democratic challenger John Kerry accusing the administration of Presiden| Bush of failing to secure the {ite.

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.