Libya made plutonium, U.N. nuke agency says

By The Washington Post and The Associated Press

	Bukhary Syed Abu Tahir
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Working with components acquired on the black market, Libyan scientists assembled a small set of gas centrifuges capable of producing weapons-grade uranium, and soon ordered 10,000 more, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported.

Libya also gathered great quantities of high-test metals that could be used to construct centrifuges, yet never developed necessary manufacturing capability or produced enough material to make a bomb, the agency said in the most detailed report yet on Libya's nuclear program.

Much of the information came from the Libyan government of Moammar Gadhafi, who declared in December that he would surrender his country's unconventional weapons and reveal details of his secret projects to build them. The IAEA credited Libya with "active cooperation and openness" after years of subterfuge.

Plutonium was produced only in "very small quantities" at the Tajura Research Reactor, the report said.

Indeed, Libya's program, which relied on the network of Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, appeared to be in some disarray, the report indicated. Centrifuges once assembled had been taken apart and stored. "You don't get any sense from this report that Libya was in any hurry," said David Albright, a physicist and former U.N. weapons inspector. "I don't even get a sense from this report that they had a date when they expected to have a nuclear weapon."

A Malaysian police report released yesterday said Khan, who founded Pakistan's nuclear program, sold uranium-enrichment equipment to Iran for $3 million as part of a thriving black market in nuclear arms. The report — based on interviews with one of the operation's purported middlemen, Bukhary Syed Abu Tahir — reveals details about alleged deals. It lays out the extent of the black market, which appears to have included a company owned by the son of Malaysia's prime minister, as well as British and Swiss middlemen.

Tahir, 44, a Sri Lankan, says he was one of several people who helped Khan sell nuclear technology to willing bidders. Khan confessed this month to leaking nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Malaysia's investigation into Tahir began after a company controlled by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's son was said to have unwittingly supplied the network. Tahir told police he was recruited to Khan's network in 1994. That year, on Khan's instructions, Tahir arranged for two containers of used centrifuge units from Pakistan to be sent to Iran aboard an Iranian-owned merchant ship, the report says.

One operative named as working for Khan is Peter Griffin, a Briton whom Tahir alleged designed the Libyan workshop and sent eight Libyan technicians to Spain to learn how to use lathes for centrifuge parts.

According to the report, two others were Freidrich Tinner, a Swiss engineer whom Khan met in the 1980s, and his son, Urs Tinner, 39, who allegedly worked with Tahir in getting Malaysian company Scomi Precision Engineering, or SCOPE, to produce centrifuge parts.
 
Swiss authorities have launched an investigation into Urs Tinner's alleged role, officials there said yesterday. The Tinner family sent The Associated Press a statement saying Urs Tinner worked for SCOPE in Kuala Lumpur as a technical consultant for the past three years and controlled the manufacture of machinery parts, but "information about the customer or the purpose of the goods was unavailable to him during the whole period."

A Malaysian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that while Tahir is under close surveillance, there are no immediate plans to detain him because investigators had found no "compelling evidence" that he broke Malaysian or other laws.

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