Word: libya
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WORLD: West Germany does an about- face on its role in the building of Libya' s controversial chemical plant...
...early 1987 U.S. intelligence officials had become concerned that Libya's mercurial leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was developing a chemical-weapons capability. By mid-1987 U.S. analysts were convinced that a facility at Rabta, 50 miles southwest of Tripoli, which began showing up in satellite photos in 1985, was indeed a chemical-weapons plant. Code-named "Pharma-150" by the Libyans, the plant was built under tight security conditions, with a 1,300-man force of cheap labor imported from Thailand. Foreign consultants entered the country without visas and left no hotel or other records of their stay in Libya...
...office in Frankfurt through which the firm's chief, an exiled Iraqi arms merchant named Ihsan Barbouti, 64, orchestrated the involvement of Imhausen and as many as 30 other firms and individuals from West Germany, Switzerland and Austria. At least some of the equipment shipped to Libya was ostensibly purchased by I.B.I. for a Hong Kong firm called Pen-Tsao, which has a Hamburg subsidiary founded by Imhausen's president, Jurgen Hippenstiel-Imhausen. Earlier, Hippenstiel- + Imhausen had not only denied any involvement in the project but gone so far as to say, "I don't even know where ((Libya...
...Antwerp shipping company named Cross Link Group. Last week, acting on information supplied by West German customs officials, Belgian authorities arrested Gedopt for falsifying bills of lading on a shipment of Imhausen equipment that left Germany addressed to Pen-Tsao in Hong Kong but was later diverted to Libya through Antwerp. Gedopt reportedly admitted making many such diversions, for Imhausen and other companies, but denied knowing that any shipments he handled had been destined for a chemical-weapons facility...
...Even Libya, while continuing to claim that the huge desert plant was built strictly as a pharmaceutical facility, had a small role in documenting West Germany's participation in the project. The Libyan Ambassador to the United Nations, Ali Treiki, confirmed that West German firms "did help us, not only in this plant, in other plants also...