Word: libyans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kohl's sudden turnabout last week touched off a rash of inquiries in West Germany to establish who knew what and when. On Friday government spokesman Friedhelm Ost said the country's intelligence agency had given Bonn in mid- October "serious information" about Imhausen's possible role in the Libyan project. Whether or not Kohl received those details, he was definitely informed about the U.S. case against Imhausen when he visited Washington in mid-November. Says Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charles Thomas: "When Kohl left here, he was absolutely convinced." A Kohl adviser was not quite as sweeping...
...finger pointing. Press reports obviously based on leaks from U.S. officials began appearing on New Year's Day. The next day, through a spokesman, Bonn issued the first of several denials, claiming that "we have no evidence so far that German firms or persons have been involved" in the Libyan project...
Bonn's denials also began to erode in the face of a series of embarrassing disclosures in the West German press. The most detailed appeared last Thursday in the weekly Stern, which traced the Libyan project to I.B.I. Engineering, a now defunct firm. I.B.I. had set up an 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...
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...
International negotiations on chemical weapons are scheduled to resume in Geneva under United Nations auspices on Feb. 7. George Bush, for one, promised last week to make control of such arms a major foreign policy objective of his Administration. As the controversy over the Libyan facility vividly demonstrates, however, controlling the behavior of a terrorist state -- and of Western firms willing to do business with such countries -- is not easy...