I still can’t believe the Swiss shredded the evidence.

AP’s Hanspeter Haefliger reports that Swiss authorities, under the supervision of the IAEA, shredded many documents relating to the Urs Tinner-AQ Khan case:

The documents formed part of a case against three members of the Tinner family who are suspected of involvement in the nuclear smuggling ring of Abdul Qadeer Khan, a key figure in Pakistan’s atomic weapons program. Khan has admitted selling nuclear arms technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

[snip]

“There were detailed construction plans for nuclear weapons, for gas ultracentrifuges to enrich weapons-grade uranium as well as for guided missile delivery systems,” [Swiss Federal President Pascale] Couchepin told reporters in the Swiss capital, speaking publicly on the matter for the first time.

[snip]

The documents were destroyed under the observation of the U.N.‘s International Atomic Energy Agency, he said. The government in November ordered the files to be destroyed, but did not make the decision public at the time.

I guess this means that Urs Tinner ins’t going to trial. Which probably means he was working for the man.

George Tenet, writing in At the Center of the Storm, claimed that beginning in the late 1990s, the CIA gained access to the Khan network though “a series of daring operations over several years.”

I think, at this point, with no one actually like going to jail for running the AQ Khan network, I am pretty convinced that the entire network by 2003 was on the US payroll.

***

In related news, AQ Khan is celebrating Pakistan’s national “nuclear deterrence day” — you think I made that up? May 28 was the ten year anniversary of Pakistan’s nuclear tets — by exercising his new freedom to shoot his mouth off.

He seems to have given half a dozen interviews to AFP, ABC, Dawn’s Syed Irfan Raza, The Guardian’s Declan Walsh, IANS’ Muhammad Najeeb, Reuters’ Kamran Haider and Kyodo News — and those are just the ones I managed to track down.

Khan told Kyodo that the shredded Swiss documents would have proved that the suppliers played the central role in the Khan network:

In a written interview delivered through a family friend, Khan told
Kyodo News the information destroyed by the Swiss government would have gone “a long way” in proving his innocence of charges that he had supplied nuclear technology and information to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

“The documents revealed that all the information which I am accused of proliferating was available with the suppliers. It proved that the Western suppliers from Switzerland, Germany and South Africa all had complete details on nuclear weapons. They provided this technology to all who were willing to pay,” Khan said.

“Yes, the documents would have gone a long way in proving my
innocence,” he wrote.

Generally, the claim is that he was a scapegoat.