MINISTER REFUTES COVERING UP DEADLY GASES IN WAREHOUSE BLAST

ZAGREB, Feb 28 (Hina) - Croatia's defence minister has dismissed claims made in a weekly recently to the effect that a commission headed by the incumbent military chief-of-staff covered up the presence of deadly gases in the wake of a 1994 military warehouse explosion. #L# Feral Tribune also claimed Minister Zeljka Antunovic was responsible for covering up how the hydrogen cyanide had evaporated. Its feature included a confidential document on the presence of deadly gases after the blast in the Duboki Jarak military warehouse in Sesvete near Zagreb, and accused the current authorities of not declassifying the document and informing the public. "This is amateur coverage of very serious issues...yet another of the countless attempts to divert public attention to a non-existent sensation," Antunovic said after a ceremony at the Armed Forces Centre for International Military Operations. The minister thinks the feature is an attempt to frame the recently appointed military chief-of-staff, general Josip Lucic. Asked who might want to do that, she said some of his current or former colleagues. Recalling the Duboki Jarak tragedy, Antunovic said six people were killed in the explosion and not by poisoning. Commenting on the part of the article about her responsibility, the minister said her current responsibility and duties were "above digging archives and removing some state secret seals from irrelevant and banal documents". The defence ministry's public relations service informed Hina today that a Public Health Institute report of 29 December 1994 stated that all the hydrogen cyanide had burned in the explosion. The concentration of poisonous gases after the explosion and from the burning hydrogen cyanide in the facilities in which it had been stored was high but did not pose any danger to the surrounding area, read the report. (hina) ha