A substance that prompted the evacuation of a U.N. weapons inspection office last month appears to be a nontoxic solvent and not a chemical warfare agent as first suspected, police and U.N. officials said Thursday. A team of experts will investigate how the substance came to be mislabeled in the midtown Manhattan weapons inspection office, leading officials to suspect it was hazardous phosgene. "We have good news that there is nothing at this point that we can see as being harmful," U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas told reporters. But she added: "One has to know why it happened so it won't happen again. ... There are security issues."

The material was found Aug. 24 at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, office with an inventory number that was later matched to records indicating it could be phosgene, a chemical substance used extensively in World War I as a choking agent.

The records indicate the material was from a 1996 excavation of the bombed-out research and development building at Iraq's main chemical weapons facility at Muthana, near Samarra. The entire facility was extensively bombed during the 1991 Gulf War, UNMOVIC spokesman Ewen Buchanan said.

U.N. and U.S. officials said immediately after the discovery that the material posed no threat. However, UNMOVIC staff members were evacuated from their office on Manhattan's east side and the substance was removed by a team of hazardous materials experts from the FBI and New York police and sent to a laboratory for testing.

Preliminary results indicate the substance was a nontoxic commercial solvent, police spokesman Paul Browne said.

Montas said U.N. officials are awaiting final lab results to determine the exact nature of the substance. Buchanan said last week it was in liquid form, suspended in oil in a soda-can-sized container that was sealed in a plastic bag.

"If it turns out to be something that was mislabeled, we'll need to find out why it was mislabeled," said a U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the final lab results have not yet been received. "An error was made, but we don't know yet just what it was."

Brian Mullady, a senior UNMOVIC official, has said the staff found no more suspicious items when it did an immediate sweep of the rest of its archives after the mystery substance was discovered

The material had been in the files of UNMOVIC and its predecessor inspection agency, UNSCOM, apparently since 1996, when it was inadvertently shipped to U.N. administrative offices instead of a chemical laboratory, police said.

U.N. inspectors pulled out of Iraq just before the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and were barred by the U.S. from returning. In June, the Security Council voted to shut down UNMOVIC and the U.N. nuclear inspection operation in Iraq.

The UNMOVIC office is now in the process of closing.

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Associated Press Writer Tom Hays in New York contributed to this report.