Word: tripoli
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September 1988: The U.S. State Department declares that Libya "has established a chemical-warfare production capability" at Rabta, 40 miles south of Tripoli. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi protests that Rabta is designed to manufacture only pharmaceuticals...
...been quite 180 degrees, but it was close enough -- and sudden enough -- to qualify as a mighty abrupt about-face. After first insisting that his government could find nothing to substantiate U.S. charges that West German companies helped the Libyans build a chemical-weapons factory in the desert outside Tripoli, Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week admitted that Washington might, after all, know what it was talking about. He changed his mind, Kohl said, after the government examined "certain documents" that had been "seized in the past few days." As prosecutors opened a criminal investigation of the West German firm Imhausen...
...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...
...Western Europe jittery American allies wondered whether Reagan was once again indulging himself by kicking his favorite terrorist -- and what the cost would be. Military bases went on alert in Italy, where Lampedusa Island was the target of an amateurish Libyan missile attack after the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in 1986. Britain supported the U.S. assertion that Rabta is intended for weapons production, but the Thatcher government urged Washington not to attack it. The French, who are host to the chemical-weapons conference at UNESCO headquarters, were irritated. The sharpest criticism came from the leftist Paris daily Liberation: "Gaddafi...
...known as the "poor man's atom bomb." Poison gases, after all, are cheap and easy to manufacture. "All a terrorist needs is a milk bottle of nerve gas," says a British weapons expert, "and that he can get from a quiet lab in a back street of Tripoli." Thus even if a treaty could be hammered out to the satisfaction of Moscow and Washington, says Burns, the U.S. would not sign unless every nation in possession of chemical arsenals agreed to it as well...