PARIS, October 30, 2004 - A French journalist who visited the Qaqaa munitions depot south of Baghdad in November last year said she witnessed Islamic insurgents looting vast supplies of explosives more than six months after the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The account of Sara Daniel, which will be published Wednesday in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, lends further weight to allegations that American occupying forces in Iraq failed to protect hundreds of tons of munitions from extremists plotting attacks against their own troops.

Much of the controversy has centered around the disappearance of about 380 tons of the powerful HMX explosive. The material, which had been monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency before the war and subsequently sealed in bunkers by its inspectors, was reported missing by Iraqi officials earlier this month.

Daniel, who spent nearly two hours at Qaqaa with a group that has since become known as the Islamic Army of Iraq, could not confirm seeing buildings that carried the agency's seal or explosives that were marked to be of the HMX variety. But her report is one of terrorists having easy access to a vast weapons inventory.

"I was utterly stupefied to see that a place like that was pretty much unguarded and that insurgents could help themselves for months on end," Daniel said on Friday. "We were there for a long time and no one disturbed the group while they were loading their truck."

A man who identified himself as Abu Abdallah and led the group Daniel was with, told her that his men and numerous other insurgent groups had rushed to Qaqaa after U.S.-led troops captured Baghdad on April 9 last year. The groups stole truck-loads of material from what used to be the biggest explosive factory in the Middle East in the expectation that coalition forces would move quickly to seal it off, Daniel was told.

Abu Abdullah and his men showed her the arsenal of rocket launchers, grenades and explosives hidden near their small farm houses, she said.

But much to the insurgents' surprise, Qaqaa was not sealed off by U.S. soldiers, leading many groups to stop hoarding and instead going for regular refills of explosive materials, according to Abu Abdullah.

Daniel said she saw how poorly guarded the munitions complex was. During the drive there last November, she recalled seeing few patrols and "far away" from the site. The truck was stopped only once, for about three minutes, Daniel said, by a U.S. soldier in a tank.

Daniel said those who went to Qaqaa to stock up on munitions appeared ready to use them to attack the occupying forces. On Nov. 22, a few days after her visit at Qaqaa, Abu Abdallah's group fired a surface-to-air missile at a DHL cargo-plane. The men gave her a video tape of themselves launching the attack in which she says she clearly recognized Abu Abdallah.

Daniel said she decided to write about her experience at Qaqaa after the disappearance of the HMX explosive became a key dispute in the U.S. presidential election campaign.

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