Mossad threat to firms that aided Pak’s N-arms

Agency ‘bombed’ German, Swiss companies

Jerusalem, Jan. 4: Israel’s espionage agency Mossad is suspected of having bombed and issued threats to German and Swiss companies that “energetically worked” to aid Pakistan in its nascent nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s as the Jewish state saw Islamabad acquiring nuclear capabilities as an “existential threat”, a leading daily said here on Tuesday.

The Jerusalem Post quoted a prominent Swiss daily report that “the suspicion that Mossad carried out the attacks and issued threats soon arose” after the three bombings in 1981 on three of these companies following an unsuccessful intervention by the United States to stop the activities”. “For Israel, the prospect that Pakistan, for the first time, could become an Islamic State with an atomic bomb posed an existential threat,” Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) reported on Sunday.

Pakistan on May 28, 1998 conducted five simultaneous underground nuclear tests at Ras Koh Hills in Chagai district of Balochistan province. Codenamed Chagai-I, it was Pakistan’s first public test of nuclear weapons.

The second nuclear test, Chagai-II, followed on May 30 in the same year.

Pakistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran worked closely together in the 1980s on developing nuclear weapons devices in which the intensive work of German and Swiss companies in aiding their nuclear programme is “relatively well researched”, NZZ reported.

“New, previously unknown, documents from archives in Bern and Washington sharpen this picture,” it claimed. Swiss historian Adrian Hanni is quoted to have said that Mossad was likely involved in the bomb attacks on Swiss and German companies even though there was no “smoking gun” to prove that the Israeli espionage agency carried out the attacks after these efforts were discovered.

The organisation for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in South Asia had claimed responsibility for the explosions in Switzerland and Germany. NZZ report also mentions the role of disgraced late Pakistani nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who crisscrossed Europe during the 1980s to secure technology and blueprints from Western institutions and companies to develop a nuclear bomb.

Khan is said to have met a delegation of Iran’s Organisation for Atomic Energy in 1987 at a Zurich hotel.

The Iranian delegation is said to have been led by Engineer Masud Naraghi, the chief of Iran’s nuclear energy commission. —