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THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15 2001

Al-Qaeda's $1m hunt for atomic weapons

BY DANIEL MCGRORY

OSAMA BIN LADEN infamously described it as his “religious duty” to get his hands on a nuclear bomb, convinced that his enemies would think twice about attacking him or those he claimed to support if he had such a device. In his headquarters in Kabul in January 1999, he calmly announced during an interview: “It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.”

Intelligence services have no doubt that he has been as good as his word. For the past eight years, bin Laden’s agents have travelled the world, spending more than £1 million in trying to acquire the ultimate weapon of terror. What nobody can say for sure is how far they succeeded.

“We know about the failed deals, the double crosses and the bungled attempts,” one Western source said. “But what if they did get something?” There is evidence of bin Laden trying to manufacture his own crude bomb, and proof of how his lieutenants plotted to steal warheads from Pakistan. Only now, after the atrocities of September 11, have rival security agencies begun to pool their intelligence, and concluded that bin Laden had recently stepped up his nuclear quest.

The belief is that he was after radioactive material that could be packed with TNT, so when it detonated it would contaminate a densely populated area for decades — a “dirty” bomb.

He is in a race with others, Saddam Hussein included, to acquire some of the fissile material that has gone missing. Russia was forced to confess it has “mislaid” more than 300 “suitcase bombs” made before the fall of communism. These devices, designed to stop advancing troops, have a power equivalent to 1,000lb of conventional explosives, which is about half the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Russia made 3,000 of these, but in 1996, when Moscow tried to account for them, it realised how many were missing. The following year Russian and US intelligence reports revealed their suspicions that the Russian mafia had sold several of these devices to rogue regimes or terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda.

Earlier this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency voiced its fears that bin Laden had got hold of some of the fissile materials for which it could not account. The Vienna-based agency has recorded 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear materials since 1993. Eighteen involved small amounts of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the crucial material needed to make a nuclear bomb.

At least one of these cases directly involved a known al-Qaeda operative. Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who defected from al-Qaeda and helped to convict former colleagues for the 1998 bombing of US embassies in East Africa, says he tried to buy enriched uranium in Sudan. He claimed to have bought the materials for $1 million from a close associate of a senior army officer and says he was paid a £6,000 bonus by a delighted bin Laden. Mr al-Fadl concedes he had no way of knowing if the materials were authentic, but says they were sent to bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan.

A Bulgarian businessman says that he met bin Laden earlier this year after being asked to help to get hold of highly radioactive material. The businessman, a former intelligence officer, says he was offered £137,000 to set up an environmental company as front to buy nuclear waste, but refused. The following day he was visited by a Pakistani scientist who asked if he could buy spent nuclear fuel rods from the Kozlodui nuclear electricity plant in Bulgaria.

The al-Qaeda intermediary, who said he was a chemical engineer, is one of several Pakistani scientists questioned since September 11 about their links with bin Laden. Two others were said to have built a flour mill in Afghanistan which intelligence experts suspected hid a more sinister purpose and so was high on the list of targets for the US airstrikes.

In September 1998 Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, alleged to be a high-level aide to bin Laden, was arrested in Germany after trying to buy low-grade nuclear reactor fuel. A Pakistani intelligence agent working for al-Qaeda, named as Mohammed Abbas, placed an order with an undercover US agent posing as an arms dealer for six nuclear switches and a quantity of plutonium after announcing over lunch in New York that he meant to “kill all Americans”.