NEW DELHI, Nov 28: Israel’s external intelligence agency, Mossad, ran a highly secretive bombing campaign directed at individuals in Europe helping Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan build a nuclear weapon, The Hindustan Times said on Wednesday.

It quoted “Deception”, a new book authored by investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, as saying that the first victim was Heinz Mebus, a close friend of Dr Khan, who had helped build Pakistan’s fluoride and uranium conversion plants in 1979.

“A letter bomb exploded inside Mebus’s home in Erlangen, West Germany. He was out at work, but his dog died in the attack,” says the book.

European investigators link-ed this bombing to another one in Berne, Switzerland, in February 1981, outside the home of Eduard German, managing director of CORA Engineering, which supplied a gasification and solidification unit to Pakistan in 1979.

Berne police could not find any trace of the attackers, only references to a gang calling itself the Group for Non-Proliferation in South Asia.

They, however, found that similar attacks had been carried out by other equally untraceable groups, including one called the Committee to Safeguard the Islamic Revolution.

“Then, on 18 May 1981, another bomb exploded, this one planted in the southern German town of Markdof outside a company that had been supplying Pakistan since 1976,” the book added.

Clearly, efforts to close down Dr Khan’s nuclear business, finally accomplished by the United States in 2003-04, had begun back in 1981, the report said.