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Cuba showed a U.N. meeting in August against biological weapons pictures of an alleged U.S. operation to plague the island with a crop-eating pest and called for an international investigation.
It was the first time the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva has dealt with a complaint under a 1991 provision which lets a nation that believes it has come under biological attack to seek a meeting to investigate it.
Washington has denied the charge, but will have to explain to the convention just why a mystery plane was emitting smoke on a low flight path over a remote corner of Cuba.
Cuba says a U.S. government crop-dusting plane for anti-narcotics operations sprayed a substance over Cuban potato fields last October that led to the appearance of a crop-eating insect.
"We want an investigation on what happened," deputy foreign minister and former Ambassador to Great Britain Maria de los Angeles Flores told reporters outside the session of signatories of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention."It's important we can discuss our demand in this forum."
Cuba showed the session alleged evidence of the pest attack, including photographs, maps and laboratory reports on the insect.
Flores said the first signs of the "thrips palmi" pest appeared in plantations on the Lenin state horticultural farm in western Matanzas province in December last year.
A single-engine civilian S2R crop-dusting plane operated by the U.S. State Department was sighted over the province Oct. 21, she said in her presentation.
At first the State Department denied the plane ever existed but was later forced to acknowledge that such a plane flew over western Cuba during a flight from Florida to the Cayman Islands in October. It now says the plane emitted smoke to identify its position to a Cuban commercial airliner.
Cuba says that smoke emissions are not used in standard aviation practice and that planes such as the one involved are not normally equipped with smoke generators. It also asks Washington why its aircraft did not seek guidance from air traffic control. It said the crew of the Cuban plane said they saw a liquid, not smoke, being emitted and that the plane was fitted with large tanks not normally used for fuel or herbicides.
Washington denies all the allegations. The convention has no mechanism for verification, and experts doubt an in-depth investigation can be carried out because they say the pest in question can easily be carried around by winds.