WASHINGTON - An Army demolition expert said Friday that his former unit in Iraq destroyed hundreds of tons of ammunition and explosives in a part of the munitions complex at al-Qaaqa in April 2003.

But the Defense Department said it was not clear whether those munitions had anything to do with the nearly 380 tons of high explosives that the Iraqi government and the International Atomic Energy Agency have said are missing from the complex.

Soon afterward, however, Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking at a campaign stop in Dimondale, Mich., cited the Army officer's comments, at a Pentagon news conference, as evidence that some of the missing explosives had been demolished.

"They seized and destroyed some 250 tons of ammunition," Cheney said, "which included in that amount some significant portions of the explosives in question."

At the news conference, the demolition expert, Maj. Austin Pearson, and the Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, were both asked repeatedly whether the material the unit destroyed was the same as that reported missing. They both said they did not know.

Pearson, of the 24th Ordnance Company, 24th Corps Support Group, said the munitions destruction that his unit undertook had been part of a routine process of clearing away dangerous explosives that posed an immediate danger to U.S. troops operating in the area beginning in April 2003.

Di Rita said that while some of what Pearson described destroying was a plastic explosive called RDX, similar to some of the material that the International Atomic Energy Agency has said is missing, "I can't say that RDX that was on the list of the IAEA is in what the major pulled out."

Other explosives that Pearson's unit destroyed on April 13, 2003, 10 days after U.S. forces first reached al-Qaaqa, included TNT, detonation cords, initiators and white phosphorus rounds - none of them the type of material that had been inspected and sealed by the agency before the war.

"I did not see any IAEA seals at the locations that we went into," Pearson told reporters. "I was not looking for that. My mission specifically was to go in there and prevent the exposure of U.S. forces and to minimize that by taking out what was easily accessible and putting it back and bringing it in to our captured ammunition holding area."