GENEVA, Dec 13: Three Swiss engineers — a father and his two sons — have been charged with breaking arms export laws by aiding a nuclear smuggling ring that supplied Libya’s atomic weapons programme, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
The formal indictment follows almost a decade of politically charged investigation by Swiss authorities that lifted the veil on one of the most successful international intelligence operations to stop nuclear proliferation to what the United States says rogue states.
Urs Tinner, 46, his brother Marco, 43, and their father Friedrich, 74, are accused of providing technology and know-how to the nuclear smuggling network of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the federal prosecutors’ office in Bern said in a statement.
The smuggling ring sold key equipment such as centrifuges for uranium enrichment to various countries until its operations were disrupted by the US in 2003.
Prosecutors said the Tinners have agreed to ask for a shortened legal procedure, under which defendants admit the basic charges against them but face no more than five years in prison.
An unidentified fourth defendant who prosecutors said played a subordinate role would be charged in a separate legal proceeding with breaking Swiss arms exports laws.
Prosecutors said in their statement the question of the Tinners’ cooperation with the CIA remains unresolved, because the Swiss government has denied a request to open a criminal investigation into the issue.
Urs Tinner, who was released on bail in December 2008 after almost five years in investigative detention, claimed in a 2009 interview with Swiss TV station SF1 that he had tipped off US intelligence about a delivery of centrifuge parts meant for Libya’snuclear weapons programme. The shipment was seized at the Italian port of Taranto in 2003, forcing Libya to admit and eventually renounce its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
The CIA has declined to comment on the Tinner case. But the agency has said in the past that “the disruption of the A.Q. Khan network was a genuine intelligence success, one in which the CIA played a key role”.—AP