Word: khans
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Gaddafi soon upped the ante. In 1997, Khan's Libyan contacts told him they wanted P-1 and P-2 centrifuges and the equipment to build hundreds more. The deal was worth $100 million. To fill the order, Khan turned to old contacts in Western Europe and South Africa, in some instances using the same people he had done business with in the 1980s. Among the shadowy middlemen involved over the years were South African Johan Meyer and German-- South African Gerhard Wisser, who allegedly helped set up a processing facility that could be shipped whole to Libya. Khan...
...Khan's base of operations became Dubai, with its easy transit connections by air and its balmy beachfront climate. Dealmaking was suitably informal. A key member of Khan's network told investigators that Iranian contacts once dropped off in Khan's apartment two suitcases containing $3 million in cash as a payment. From 1999 on, Khan traveled to Dubai 41 times, the Pakistani government says. Khan also kept a penthouse on posh al-Maktoum Road. When arranging a shipment, he would set up in Dubai dozens of shell companies consisting of nothing more than "a fax machine and an empty...
...meetings with his underlings and potential customers, Khan favored other exotic locales: Istanbul and Casablanca. Pakistani sources say Khan used Dubai gold dealers to launder smuggling profits. At the height of his power, Khan was worth as much as $400 million...
...Khan's right-hand man, what an intelligence official calls the managing director of his operation, was Buhary Sayed Abu Tahir, 44, a Sri Lankan whom Khan first met in Dubai in the mid-'90s. Tahir idolized Khan, mimicking him in sometimes expensive ways. In homage to the boss's vintage fleet, Tahir tooled around Dubai in a luxury car. To Khan, Tahir became indispensable. He divided his time between Kuala Lumpur (his wife is Malaysian) and Dubai. Through his connections in Malaysia, Tahir arranged for centrifuge components to be manufactured at a publicly traded company called Scomi Precision Engineering...
Meanwhile, Khan expanded. He made contact with the North Korean government as early as 1993, according to Pakistani investigators. In the late 1990s he began shipping centrifuges and the means to make them--"the whole package," as a U.S. intelligence official put it--in bulk to Pyongyang, sometimes aboard Pakistani military cargo planes. Pakistani officials say Khan has testified that the North Koreans were so appreciative that in 1999 they took him on a private tour of their nuclear facilities during his visit to Pyongyang. U.S. and IAEA investigators believe that Khan also traveled to Saudi Arabia and Egypt...