8:51am UK, Tuesday May 18, 2004

A shell loaded with the deadly sarin nerve gas has exploded in Iraq.

The artillery round, which was set up as a roadside bomb, went off as Coalition soldiers were inspecting it.

Iraqi bombs containing sarin destroyed by UNSCOM

Two soldiers were treated for minor injures.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference that only a small amount of the gas was released.

"Two explosive ordnance team members were treated for minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the partial detonation of the round," Kimmitt told a press conference in Baghdad.

He said that the deadly agent was produced after two chemicals in separate sections of the shell mixed after it was fired.

"Mixing and dispersal of the agent from such a projectile as an IED (improvised explosive device) is very limited," he said.

"The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war."

It is the first time chemcial agents have been found in Iraq since the US-led war began.

However, experts said that the presence of sarin did not indicate that Saddam Hussein had an ongoing programme to create Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Instead, they speculated that the sarin dated back to the Iran-Iraq war.

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix concurred, saying: "There can be debris from the past and that's a very different thing from having stockpiles and supplies."

A sarin gas attack on Tokyo's subway, carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult in 1995, killed 12 people.

A single drop of the gas can cause an agonising, choking death.