News, December 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
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Libya Bares Its Nuke Secrets
Associated Press, Aab News
TRIPOLI, 30 December 2003 — The UN nuclear chief said yesterday that his visits to four once-secret nuclear sites proved Libya had been in the early stages of a weapons program before it dismantled its efforts, and said the equipment and technology had come from a number of countries.
“What we have seen is a program in the very initial stages of development,” Mohammed El-Baradei told reporters. “We haven’t seen any industrial-scale facility to produce highly enriched uranium; we haven’t seen any enriched uranium” — the material needed for developing nuclear weapons. El-Baradei and his team of experts visited four previously unmentioned nuclear sites in Tripoli on Sunday, and he said all the equipment had been dismantled and boxed up. The inspections follow leader Muammar Qaddafi’s decision to abandon his country’s attempts to produce weapons of mass destruction.
El-Baradei said the origins of Libya’s technology would easily be identified “as they were of a familiar design.” He suggested a “sophisticated network” was behind the technology: “a number of different people in a number of different places, a network which you can call a cartel but not necessarily with the knowledge of a particular country or countries. It has been across many countries in the world.”
El-Baradei had said earlier that Libya received its weapons equipment “through the black market and middlemen.”
Yesterday, he declined to reveal the number or names of Libyan scientists or whether they received training in Europe or the United States but said they were “well competent scientists.”
“That is good for Libya... to work on the peaceful development in nuclear program for civilian purposes,” he said.
He called on North Korea to follow Libya’s example.
“If a country was to show transparency and active cooperation, that can open the doors of lots of avenues for a complete change of face... It is a lesson for North Korea to observe,” El-Baradei said.
He said he hoped the Libyan transparency would help bring the nuclear issue to closure “in the next few months.”
El-Baradei met with Shokri Ghanem, Libyan prime minister, and Matouq Mohammed Matouq, a Libyan deputy prime minister and head of the country’s nuclear program, to develop a plan for future inspections.
El-Baradei said Libya had agreed to sign the additional protocol to the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing more intrusive snap inspections. “Libya committed today to act as if the protocol was in force,” he told reporters before leaving Tripoli for Vienna. Six inspectors will be in Libya until Thursday.
According to El-Baradei’s spokesman, Mark Gwozdecky, the sites visited yesterday were new facilities that “have never been mentioned in the media before.”
Some of the inspectors met with Libyan officials on “technical matters concerning the history of (Libya’s) entire program” related to weapons of mass destruction, the spokesman said.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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