Swiss close to charging three in nuclear:smuggling plot

A Swiss judge is recommending that smuggling charges be brought against three alleged members of the world's most notorious nuclear trafficking ring, reviving a politically sensitive case that U.S. officials have repeatedly tried to squelch because it might expose sensitive CIA secrets, NBC News has learned.
After more than two years of investigation, Swiss magistrate Andreas Mueller said he plans to announce Thursday that he is recommending that his country's attorney general criminally charge Swiss engineer Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Marco and Urs, as middlemen in the nuclear smuggling network of rogue Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan.
Mueller told NBC News that he had found that the Tinners, who ran a Swiss high-tech company, built and sold centrifuge parts for a nuclear enrichment facility being planned by the Libyan regime of Col. Muammar Gaddafi.
"This concerns members of the biggest nuclear proliferation network ever," said Mueller, who has called a news conference in Bern to announce his findings. "This prosecution will be a signal to other countries that proliferation doesn't pay."
Swiss lawyers representing Friedrich and Marco Tinner did not respond to requests for comment this week. The Swiss attorney general, Erwin Beyeler, who under the Swiss system of justice must now decide whether to accept Mueller's recommendation, also did not respond to an email request for comment.
Book depicts extensive smuggling network
The action comes as questions about the reach and damage done by the Khan network continue to bedevil U.S. intelligence and international non-proliferation officials. A book to be published next month, "Fallout: The True Story of the CIA's Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking," by investigative journalists Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, concludes that technology and secrets distributed by the Khan network were greater than was previously known, including centrifuge and components for North Korea's ongoing nuclear program.
For decades, Khan — a Pakistani metallurgist — ran a vast international black-market smuggling network that supplied critical materials and, in some cases, nuclear bomb designs for the atomic programs of Pakistan, Iran, Libya and North Korea. The CIA, working with Britain's MI6, finally shut the network down in late 2003, and Khan, widely known as the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear program, was placed under house arrest by the government of former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Posted in Swiss close to charging three in nuclear:smuggling plot