BP: Halliburton destroyed key oil spill evidence

NEW ORLEANS - BP, in a high-stakes court filing, is accusing Halliburton of destroying damaging evidence about the quality of its cement slurry that went into drilling the oil well that blew out last year and caused the nation's worst offshore oil spill.

On Monday in a New Orleans federal court, BP accused Halliburton of having intentionally destroyed evidence about possible problems with its cement slurry poured into the deep-sea Macondo well about 100 miles off the Louisiana coast. An oil well must be cemented properly to avoid blowouts.

Also in the court documents, BP accused Halliburton of failing to produce incriminating computer modeling evidence. Halliburton says the modeling is gone.

BP asked a judge to penalize Halliburton and order a court-sponsored computer forensic team to recover the missing modeling results.