KABUL, Afghanistan Two Afghan nuclear
scientists, in the strongest indication yet that al Qaeda was trying to
construct a nuclear bomb, have revealed how the terrorist group attempted to
recruit them.
The scientists disclosed how they
had risked their lives by hiding radioactive materials, sufficient to make
dozens of "dirty bombs," in the ruins of the old Aliabad mental hospital in
Kabul and in the grimy basement of Kabul University's nuclear physics
department.
Last week, a team of specially
trained British soldiers equipped with state-of-the-art instruments were led to
the caches by the two nuclear physicists.
What
they found astounded them.
There was a broken
radiotherapy machine, containing enough cobalt 60 to kill a man instantly, in
the lead-lined cancer treatment room of the hospital.
In the basement of Kabul University, there
were containers of solid and liquid radioactive material, some broken or with
the lids off; chemical warfare agents; and instruments emitting
radiation.
"We've been finding stuff that's far
more potent and dangerous than even 'dirty bombs,' which are made of nuclear
waste," said Capt. James Cameron, who heads an eight-member team from the Joint
Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Regiment, based in Bury Saint Edmunds, England,
which also monitors the activities of Iraq's Saddam Hussein from
Kuwait.
The team is in Kabul to protect the
international peacekeeping force.
Capt. Cameron
said much of the material was left over from the Soviets, "who used far higher
doses of radiation than we would." Some of the containers were damaged by the
Afghan mujahideen in the early 1990s, he
said.
"But al Qaeda and the Taliban never knew
about it. The atomic scientists tore up their papers and never said a word,"
Capt. Cameron said.
Last week, the two Afghan
scientists, Mohammed Jan Naziri, a professor of applied nuclear physics, and
Jora Mohammed Korbani, a nuclear physics professor, revealed how they had
concealed their knowledge from the
Taliban.
They said that in 1996, when the
Taliban militia first entered Kabul, they and some other colleagues on the
faculty had gathered all the radioactive sources and instruments they could find
from the university's laboratories and stored them in the nuclear science
faculty's basement.
Because they had no
radiometers and no protective clothing, the scientists moved the items as
carefully as they could, storing them between sheets of lead. They then tore up
their research documents and papers on atomic
physics.
"We didn't really know how radioactive
some of the sources were," Mr. Naziri said. "We just tried to protect
them."
Initially, the Taliban came to the
university and simply registered the names of all the professors in the nuclear
physics department.
"They didn't understand
anything about physics or what we were doing, but we knew they were looking for
physics and chemistry experts," Mr. Korbani said.
Then, one day a man from Kandahar, the
Taliban's heartland and Osama bin Laden's main base, came to talk to the
scientists at the faculty.
Mr. Naziri said he
refused to talk to the man, whom he described as "an Arab who spoke Pashtu and
Farsi poorly."
He said he asked the man for
official letters of request from the Foreign Ministry or the university and told
him he couldn't do anything without the Atomic Energy Authority's permission.
"We never saw him again," Mr. Naziri
said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Korbani, who lost his job
a year after the Taliban took Kabul, was approached by a mysterious aid agency
called the "Chand Groupi," or "Multi Group," which operated out of a house in
Kabul's Wazir Akbar Khan district, where bin Laden kept several safe houses and
where many Arab al Qaeda fighters lived.
The
agency operated separately but was linked to the Ummah Tameer-e-Nau charity, run
by the renegade Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmoud, who the
CIA has called "bin Laden's nuclear secretary." Mr. Mahmoud is currently under
house arrest in Pakistan.
Although evidence
found by the Sunday Telegraph last November and more recently, the joint team
headed by Capt. Cameron in Mr. Mahmoud's house revealed that he was engaged in
an experiment to float a helium balloon filled with anthrax over the United
States, the Multi Group was clearly attempting to construct a nuclear
bomb.
"They said to me, 'We know you're working
for the faculty of nuclear science, and we need you,'" Mr. Korbani said. "They
offered me a lot of money and said that they wanted me to find 100 other nuclear
scientists and technicians and come to
Karachi."
Mr. Korbani was then asked to write a
paper on atomic energy.
"They told me,
'Pakistan has a very powerful atomic bomb, and we are very keen on bringing such
a power to Afghanistan,'" he said. The men told him that people in Pakistan's
tribal areas would pay for the program. "They kept calling me, but I never
returned [the calls]. I knew it was too
dangerous."
Capt. Cameron said there was little
doubt that al Qaeda and the Taliban were attempting to make chemical weapons. If
not for the Kabul University scientists, al Qaeda might have successfully
constructed several "dirty bombs," he
said.
Unlike a conventional nuclear bomb, in
which atoms are split to produce a massive explosion, a dirty bomb is simply a
conventional bomb wrapped in radioactive
material.
A dirty bomb is much easier to
produce because it requires only a conventional explosive plus some radioactive
waste, such as spent fuel from a nuclear power plant or radioactive material
used in medicine.
"The Taliban would have
given their eyeteeth for the stuff these men were hiding, and if they'd found
it, I hate to think what they'd have done," Capt. Cameron said.