VIENNA, May 29: As US, British and UN experts were busy disarming Libya, a shipment of nuclear bomb-related machinery from Turkey slipped past Western intelligence agencies into Libya in March, an atomic expert said on Saturday.

Libya, which swiftly disclosed the shipment, has also denied purchasing nuclear materials from North Korea, casting doubt on news reports Pyongyang secretly provided Tripoli with uranium, diplomats close to the United Nations said.

David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and president of a U.S.-based security think-tank, said this was a shining example of the "failure of export controls" that enabled the creation of an illicit nuclear market.

In a report issued on Friday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said: "One shipment of (centrifuge) components actually arrived in Libya in March 2004, having escaped the attention of the (Western) state authorities that had seized the cargo ship BBC China in October 2003."-Reuters