Alleged poisoning backs WikiLeaks report

WASHINGTON, July 28 (UPI) -- A key U.S. adviser tells The Christian Science Monitor he was almost poisoned in Afghanistan in 2007.

The newspaper said the incident is now seen in the light of a WikiLeaks posting of an intelligence warning in June 2007 that Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's spy agency, was planning to poison the alcoholic drinks of Afghan and international soldiers.

An American geologist who advised Afghanistan's Ministry of Mines, James Yeager, said he returned to his residence in Kabul to find it had been burgled, the intruder taking money from a drawer but leaving behind a bottle of Corona beer, the newspaper reported.

Yeager opened the beer during a party a few weeks later, but sniffed it and found "that doesn't smell like beer."

Yeager is a geologist and realized the liquid smelled like sulfuric acid -- battery acid -- and got rid of it.

The Monitor said among the 90,000 documents made public by WikiLeaks is an intelligence report that said the ISI and insurgents were plotting a similar type of tampering.

"A local authority reported that ISI and insurgents are going to buy alcoholic drinks from markets (in order to) mix them with poison and use them for poisoning" Afghan and international troops, the report said, the Monitor reports.

Experts told the newspaper the public still should take the WikiLeaks reports with a grain of salt, even in light of Yeager's report.