Insider Tells Of Nuclear Deals, Cash Pakistani Scientist Netted $3 Million

The Washington Post ^ | February 21, 2004 | Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress

[neverdem]

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Feb. 20 -- The Sri Lankan businessman who was an associate of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has told Malaysian police how Khan shipped components to Libya and Iran for their nuclear weapons programs and received two briefcases with a $3 million payment from Iran, a Malaysian police report disclosed Friday.

In an insider's account of Khan's operation, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir said that Khan asked him to send two shipping containers of used centrifuges -- sophisticated equipment for enriching uranium -- to Iran from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, aboard a merchant vessel owned by an Iranian company, according to the 12-page report. In return, the Iranian contact provided the briefcases filled with dirhams, the currency of the UAE, that were stashed at Khan's guesthouse in Dubai, the report said. Tahir lives and does business in Malaysia.

Khan told Tahir that he had also flown uranium hexafluoride to Libya on a Pakistani airliner as part of a secret program he had worked out with the Libyans during the previous four years at meetings in Istanbul; Casablanca, Morocco; and Dubai, according to the document.

Uranium hexafluoride is a gas used in the process of enriching uranium. Highly enriched uranium is needed to build a nuclear weapon; at lower levels, it is used to fuel nuclear power plants.