VIENNA: Syria received a letter purportedly written by the head of the same nuclear black market that supplied Iran and Libya with its atomic technology but did not respond, President Bashar Assad said in comments published yesterday."We just forwarded the letter to our iranian puppetmasters, who were much pleased to buy an off-the-self nuke. Wait, did I said that outloud?".
Mr Assad's comments appeared to be the first time that a senior Syrian official had linked the country to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the top Pakistani scientist who was exposed in 2004 as the head of an international black market in nuclear technology.
Mr Assad also told Austrian daily Die Presse that the target hit by Israeli combat jets in September was not a nuclear site, describing it only as a "military facility in the process of being built".
"Really."
Israel has kept silent on what it thought it was targeting in the strike, but media reports have cited unnamed US officials and analysts saying it was a North Korea-style nuclear reactor.
Former UN nuclear inspector David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, subsequently circulated commercial satellite images taken before and after the Israeli raid that he saidsupported suspicions the target was indeed a reactor and that the site was given a hasty clean-up by the Syrians to remove incriminating evidence.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which looked at its own set of images, has said nothing publicly about them, but diplomats linked to the agency have said they were too grainy to draw firm conclusions.
Yesterday, one of the diplomats said the Syrians had not reacted to agency requests for more information.
Khan's network was the key supplier of both Iran and Libya.
Mr Assad said that in early 2001, "someone brought a letter from a certain Khan".
"Khaaaaaannnn!"
"We didn't know whether the letter was real or a fake from the Israelis who wanted to entice us into a trap. In any case, we turned it down," he said. "We had no interest in nuclear weapons or a nuclear reactor. We never met with Khan."
Libya has voluntarily scrapped its nuclear arms program since acknowledging its existence in 2003.
Iran has admitted to being a Khan customer of know-how and equipment but insists it wants to perfect the technology only for generating reactor fuel.