Methyl isocyanate, the gas that leaked from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, last week killing 2,000 people and injuring thousands more, is also manufactured in Israel and four other countries outside the United States.
Officials for Union Carbide, which operated the plant in India, informed The Jerusalem Post’s Washing- ton correspondent from their global headquarters in Connecticut that the chemical was manufactured and distributed by an Israeli firm, though he did not know its name.
The chemical is used to make a pesticide known as carbamates and is also produced in Japan, West Germany, Taiwan, and South Korea.
The Post’s Beersheba correspondent reported that scientists from the Makhteshim Chemical works in Beersheba have been summoned to the Health Ministry in Jerusalem to explain how the firm manufactures carboryl, a pesticide also produced at the Union Carbide plant in India where the gas leak occurred.
PRODUCT DOES NOT HAVE SAME COMPONENT
The Israeli product is called ravion and Sheike Pikarsky, deputy director of Makhteshim Chemical, said the company does not use methyl isocyanate to make it.
Pikarsky told the Post: “We have no connection with Union Carbide and we don’t have the same component … We have a product similar to (Union Carbide’s) savin, but it is made using a different process.”
Makhteshim’s ravion is made with phosgen and chlorine, and has been manufactured in Ramat Hovav some 12 kilometers south of Beersheba for four years, under strict safety rules. There have been no malfuntions, and the management is confident that its safeguards are sufficient. (By Hugh Orgel)
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