TRIPOLI, Dec 29: Libya has revealed nuclear secrets, including equipment supplied from abroad, and will allow snap inspections of suspect sites, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohammed ElBaradei said here on Monday.

After the surprise decision to come clean on its weapons programmes, Tripoli was prepared to allow IAEA inspectors random access just as if it had already signed the additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ElBaradei said.

“Libya informed me that it will act, as of today, as if the additional protocol was enforced,” ElBaradei told a press conference.

He added that during their inspections, his team had seen equipment capable of enriching uranium but it was not in operation.

“We did see centrifuges but they were dismantled in boxes,” he said. “We had not seen enriched uranium.”

He added: “We have seen similar centrifuges. They looked familiar, we can identify their origin. They are quite sophisticated.”

Asked where the equipment may have come from, ElBaradei said: “The materials appear to be coming from a number of different people, from a number of different places spanned all over the world.”

Libyan officials told the inspectors the equipment had been bought on the black market, he added.

On the success of his visit, ElBaradei said: “It was quite productive. They showed a good deal of transparency. They opened their files. They made the people available to us.

“This visit is a lesson for North Korea to emulate and to others,” he added, in what was seen as a reference to Israel.

On Sunday, IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky explained that the team “went to four nuclear sites previously unvisited and all of them were in the Tripoli area”.

However, during their inspections, the team saw “no weaponizing activities”, ElBaradei concluded.

ElBaradei was due to have one more working session with the Libyans early in the afternoon and then take his leave of the foreign minister before flying back to Vienna via Amsterdam.

The visit follows Libyan leader Moamer Qadhafi’s surprise announcement that his country was giving up the search for chemical, biological and nuclear arms.

The announcement and ElBaradei’s visit are the fruit of nine months of secret negotiations between Libya and diplomats from Britain and the United States.

ElBaradei has made it clear that he would discuss with the IAEA board to what extent Libya had fallen short of commitments to the NPT, which came into effect in 1970.—AFP