TRIPOLI, Feb 23: Libya is helping the UN nuclear watchdog find out whether other countries besides Libya obtained designs for nuclear warheads on the global black market, the body's head said on Monday. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the IAEA was collecting more and more names of individuals and companies who might be involved.

"We are still trying to understand the network, to see if other countries have received the technology, the weapons designs," he said after a meeting with deputy prime minister Matoug M. Matoug, at the start of a two-day visit to Tripoli.

He said he and Matoug had also agreed to try to finish confirming the dismantling of Libya's atomic weapons programme before a meeting of the IAEA board of governors in June. The IAEA began inspections of Libya's nuclear programme in December, after Tripoli agreed to renounce its covert nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes.

Last Friday it issued a report saying Libya had begun tring to develop nuclear weapons as far back as the early 1980s. Several Western diplomats in Vienna and a number of non-proliferation analysts say they are convinced Libya got its warhead designs from Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. The diplomats say they believe Iran was also offered the warhead blueprints, and possibly bought them. -Reuters