[David]

AP


OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada will probe how blueprints for the new headquarters of an elite military counter-terrorism unit ended up in a pile of garbage, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said Thursday.

The Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit, housed inside an armed forces base in Trenton, Ontario, is designed to cope with the aftermath of an attack using weapons of mass destruction.

The 26 blueprints were contained in one of seven defense ministry files that a passer-by found on top of garbage bags on an Ottawa street. The other six files are still missing.

"We take this very seriously. So I want to hear first exactly what went on," Day told reporters, saying he had ordered his officials to examine the incident.

The plans -- which the passer-by handed to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper -- contain detailed drawings of the building's floor plan, electrical grid and the storage bay for robots designed to detect chemical and biological agents.