Report: Nuclear sales net $3-million

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - A Malaysian inquiry revealed that the father of Pakistan's nuclear program sold uranium enrichment equipment to Iran for $3-million and signed lucrative contracts for Libya, part of a thriving black market in nuclear arms, according to a police report released Friday.

The report - based on interviews with one of the operation's purported middlemen, Bukhary Syed Abu Tahir - reveals details about alleged deals between Pakistan, Iran and Libya. 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 and British and Swiss middlemen.

Tahir, a 44-year-old Sri Lankan, says he was one of several people who helped Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, 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.

Police said the 12-page report on the three-month investigation will be given to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nonproliferation watchdog. The Malaysians urged the agency to investigate European individuals and firms.

Among details supplied by Tahir and laid out in the report are deals between Khan's operatives to sell nuclear equipment to Iran for $3-million in cash and to supply a uranium compound used in the enrichment process to Libya.

According to Tahir's account, Libya approached Khan in 1997 for help building a uranium enrichment program. Negotiations began in Istanbul, Turkey, between the Pakistani scientist and a Libyan identified as Mohamad Matuq Mohamad.

Around 2001, Khan told Tahir "a certain amount" of uranium used in the enrichment process was flown from Pakistan to Libya, the report said. Subsequently, a number of centrifuge units were flown from Pakistan to Libya.

What Khan's network couldn't get for Libya directly, it helped the country build, sending machines and technicians to set up centrifuge-making operations and calling it "Project Machine Shop 1001," according to Tahir's account.

Centrifuges are sophisticated machines that can be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons or nuclear power.

Late last year, Libya acknowledged trying to develop weapons of mass destruction and pledged to scrap them. Unlike Libya, Iran denies ever having had such ambitions.

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.

An unidentified Iranian paid for the units with about $3-million worth of dirhams, the United Arab Emirates currency.

"The cash was brought in two briefcases and kept in an apartment that was used as a guesthouse by the Pakistani nuclear arms expert each time he visited Dubai," the report said.

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

VIENNA - Supplied by the worldwide black market, Libya processed a small amount of plutonium in a nuclear weapons program that remained undetected for 20 years until Tripoli went public with its efforts, the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Friday.

Citing a confidential report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, diplomats said Libya separated grams of the substance, much less than the nearly 7 pounds required to make a nuclear bomb.

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