The United States praised South Africa on Friday for acting against Pakistan scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan’s secret nuclear network after a businessman was charged in South Africa with nuclear trafficking. He had allegedly used the network in efforts to help Libya develop an atomic weapons programme between November 2000 to November 2001.
”And without trying to provide any detail, because the detail really needs to be provided by the South Africans to the extent and whenever they’re prepared to do so, I would say that we do congratulate South Africa for its efforts to act against the A.Q. Khan network,” State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher said.
Boucher spoke after businessman Johan Meyer (53) appeared in court in the town of Vanderbijlpark south of Johannesburg a day after his arrest on charges of being in possession of nuclear-related material and of illegally importing and exporting nuclear material.
Meyer’s lawyer said he was arrested on charges that he was building a nuclear weapon.
Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, confessed in February that he had shared nuclear secrets with Iran, Libya and North Korea, triggering an international effort to track down the scientist’s accomplices.
Boucher said action by South African authorities would help in the global effort to destroy what remained of Khan’s network.
”We think that the activities that they’ve undertaken are an important contribution to international efforts to shut down this network,” he said.
”It sends the right message to proliferators everywhere that the rule of law will be applied. And we support efforts to ensure the proliferators are punished to the full extent of the law,” he explained.
South African intelligence is said to have worked closely with their US and Israeli counterparts in a year-long investigation into nuclear smuggling that led to Meyer’s arrest.
According to the charge sheet, Meyer is accused of illegally importing, manufacturing and exporting materials between Nov. 21, 2000 and Nov. 30, 2001 that ”could contribute to the design, development, manufacture, deployment, maintenance or use of weapons of mass destruction”.
The document cites a lathe manufactured by the Spanish-based company Denn, for which Meyer allegedly did not have the necessary permit from the South African Council for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The document also says Meyer, who was arrested on Thursday, was illegally in possession of material and equipment for use in gas centrifuges, used to enrich uranium, between 2000 and September 2004.
Prosecutors and defence attorneys declined to provide details of the allegations.
But Meyer’s lawyer, Heinrich Badenhorst, told the South African Press Association that his client is accused of manufacturing banned items at his engineering.
”At this stage, we deny it,” Badenhorst was quoted as saying.
Abdul Minty, chairperson of the South African Council for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, said the arrest follows an investigation into a number of companies and individuals in cooperation with other countries and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
”There has been a recovery of items alleged to have been used in the contraventions,” he said in the brief statement issued late on Thursday.
South Africa started a nuclear-weapons programme in the 1970s as a deterrent against neighbouring states opposed to apartheid and Cold War instability that was fuelling the war in nearby Angola. Two decades later, it voluntarily dismantled the programme, winning praise from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Since then, South Africa has followed a strict policy of disarmament and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Minty said in the statement.
A South Africa-based Israeli businessman, Asher Karni, was arrested in Denver on New Year’s Day and accused of using front companies and falsified documents to buy nuclear bomb triggers in the United States for shipment to Pakistan.
A South Africa-based suspect, identified only as Gerhard W., was arrested in Germany in August and accused of acting as a middleman in a 2001 request to provide pipes to Libya for use in a uranium enrichment facility. A company in South Africa manufactured the pipes, but they apparently were not delivered to Libya, prosecutors there said. – Sapa-AP, AFP