Posted on 10/02/2001 4:27:20 PM PDT by It'salmosttolate
Bin Laden associate tried to buy nuclear bomb
BY BOB PORT AND GREG B. SMITH
New York Daily News
NEW YORK -- In a 10th-floor, high-security jail cell a few blocks from the ruins of the World Trade Center sits a man Osama bin Laden was counting on in his quest to buy a nuclear bomb.
Mamdouh Mahmud Salim is the only member of bin Laden's inner circle in custody, and in many ways, he's one of the most frightening characters in bin Laden's terrorist confederacy, al Qaeda.
Last November, Salim briefly made headlines when he allegedly stabbed a Metropolitan Correctional Center guard in the eye with a carefully sharpened plastic comb.
But the most disturbing allegations concern Salim's participation in bin Laden's long and serious effort to acquire a nuclear device that would make the Sept. 11 attack seem like a practice run.
Experts agree that bin Laden probably has not yet acquired the ability to set off a nuclear weapon in his effort to drive America and Israel from what he views as Muslim holy land.
`BIG CHALLENGE'
But law enforcement sources and experts on nuclear weapons agree that bin Laden has certainly made a sustained effort to buy the enriched uranium that is the essential ingredient of any nuclear effort.
Could Bin Laden make an A-bomb?
``It's much harder than hijacking an airplane with a knife,'' said Leonard Spector, of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. But ``it's probably true that with enough time and effort, one could make a bomb. It is a big challenge, though. People have debated this for a long time.''
There have also been reports -- none confirmed -- that the terrorist leader was seeking to buy a small nuclear device.
At the center of the controversy over bin Laden's ``Manhattan Project'' is Salim, a 41-year-old, Iraqi-trained engineer.
Details of bin Laden's nuclear efforts first came to light after Sept. 14, 1998, when Salim was arrested in Germany.
Days after the Aug. 8, 1998, bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Salim traveled from Khartoum, Sudan, to Istanbul to Majorca, Spain, to Stuttgart, Germany. A friend then took him by car to Munich, where German police detained him.
He was held there for days while German and then U.S. law enforcement grilled him. Since then, evidence gathered by the FBI makes it clear that Salim was an elite member of bin Laden's ultra-secret organization.
He allegedly controlled bank accounts for al Qaeda and ran one of bin Laden's construction companies. The Justice Department has identified him as a founder of al Qaeda.
In extradition papers filed in Germany, the Justice Department listed Salim as a member of bin Laden's majlis al shura, a council that advises terrorist groups from Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Algeria and elsewhere affiliated with al Qaeda.
One of Salim's missions involved a joint operating agreement between al Qaeda and the Islamic governments of Iran and Sudan. The three agreed to produce weapons in Sudan, including ``an effort to develop chemical weapons,'' the Justice Department alleged.
Salim -- who says he trained as an electrical engineer at the University of Baghdad -- has been linked to the pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum that was bombed by U.S. forces on Aug. 20, 1998.
The bombing took place shortly after the Aug. 8 bin Laden-devised attacks on the two U.S. embassies in East Africa. The Clinton administration said the plant was manufacturing chemical weapons -- an allegation plant management denied.
But a chemical attack was only part of the plan.
EFFORT BEGAN IN 1993
As long ago as 1993, bin Laden's network began trying to make or acquire nuclear weapons, according to FBI informers and U.S. intelligence reports. By 1998, bin Laden acknowledged his effort openly.
In May that year, he issued a statement titled The Nuclear Bomb of Islam, translated by the U.S. State Department as declaring ``it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God.''
In testimony during the embassy bombing trial last year, informant Jamal Ahmed Mohamed Al-Fadl vividly recalled Salim's involvement in bin Laden's 1993 effort to buy a nuke. Al-Fadl -- who left al Qaeda in 1996 after he was caught embezzling money -- claimed he met with a former high Sudanese official to discuss buying enriched uranium. He described meeting with intermediaries who demanded $1.5 million, then driving in a jeep to an anonymous address in a Khartoum neighborhood called Bait al Mal.
There, inside a house, a bag was brought out and opened. Inside, Al-Fadl said, was a 2- to 3-foot long metal cylinder with South African markings.
He said he was instructed to go to Salim with a document spelling out this transaction, and that Salim reviewed the document and approved it.
Though Al-Fadl never saw money change hands, he got $10,000 and praise for arranging an inspection of the uranium before it was shipped to Cyprus for quality testing. Al-Fadl said he later learned, second-hand, that the uranium was good and the deal was consummated.
It's unclear what became of the uranium.
To make an atomic bomb, at least seven pounds of an extra-radioactive form of uranium that exists as a small fraction of mined uranium is needed. This highly purified U-235 is enriched, or weapons-grade, uranium.
Enriched uranium, which is hard to make, is placed in a container that implodes, compressing the uranium to a critical mass and triggering an atomic chain reaction that releases a blast equal to thousands of tons of dynamite.
A crude device might likely resemble Little Boy, the bomb crafted by America's secret Manhattan Project during World War II and dropped on Hiroshima. Little Boy was 10 feet long and weighed nearly 10,000 pounds.
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