NEW YORK, Feb 19: The selling of atomic secrets and equipment began in Europe not Islamabad, said the New York Times on Thursday quoting experts who monitor proliferation and court papers.

In an ongoing investigative series the Times noted that although Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has been "demonized" in the west but the "records show that industry scientists and Western intelligence agencies have known for decades that nuclear technology was pouring out of Europe despite national export control efforts to contain it."

The proliferation has its roots in Europe's own post-war eagerness for nuclear independence from the United States and its lax security over potentially lethal technology, the paper said.

It was abetted, critics say, by competition within Europe for lucrative contracts to bolster state-supported nuclear industries. Even as their own intelligence services warned that Pakistan could not be trusted, some European governments continued to help Pakistan's nuclear programme, it said.

Many of the names that have turned up among lists of suppliers and middlemen who fed equipment, materials and knowledge to nuclear programmes in Pakistan and other aspiring nuclear nations, are well-known players in Europe's uranium enrichment industry, a critical part of many nuclear weapons programmes. Some have been convicted of illegal exports before, the news report said.

"It was an economic consideration," said Paul Stais, a former Belgian member of the European Parliament who lobbied unsuccessfully for tighter export controls.

One name to emerge from the international investigations of Dr Khan's nuclear trade was that of Urs Tinner, a Swiss engineer who monitored production of centrifuge parts at a factory in Malaysia, the paper said.

The parts were intended for Libya. Mr Tinner's father, Friedrich Tinner, also an engineer, came under scrutiny by the Defence Department in the 1970s and again by Swiss export control authorities and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the last decade, because he was involved in exports to Pakistan and Iraq of technology used in uranium enrichment.

"Most of these people were heavily investigated in the 1970's, 80's and 90's," said Mark Hibbs, the European editor of the technical journal Nucleonics Week, published by McGraw-Hill.

The problem began with the 1970 Treaty of Almelo, under which Britain, Germany and the Netherlands agreed to develop centrifuges to enrich uranium jointly, ensuring their nuclear power industry a fuel source independent of the United States.

Urenco, or the Uranium Enrichment Company, was established the next year with its primary enrichment plant at Almelo, the Netherlands the paper said. The paper asserts that the security at Urenco was by most accounts slipshod.

The consortium relied on a network of research centres and subcontractors to build its centrifuges, and top- secret blueprints were passed out to companies bidding on tenders, giving engineers across Europe an opportunity to appropriate designs.