Swiss government authorities have confirmed that Egypt has been expanding its chemical warfare capability with the help of a major Swiss company.
The story, first reported Friday in The New York Times, said Swiss officials had “reason to believe” the firm had helped Egypt build a chemical plant intended to manufacture poison gas.
American and Swiss officials told the Times Thursday they believe the plant will be installed at Abu Zaabal, north of Cairo.
Moreover, indications are that the Abu Zaabal plant will be part of a military-industrial complex that sometime in the future will also include a joint American-Egyptian plant for assembling the M-1 tank.
Swiss officials confirmed over the weekend that Krebs A.G., a firm based in Zurich, has supplied Egypt for several years with the equipment needed to build a poison gas plant.
Klaus Jacobi, the Swiss secretary of state for foreign affairs, officially asked Krebs last week to stop further delivery of materials to Egypt and to halt all technical assistance.
The Swiss officials said their government was first informed of a possible link between Krebs and the Egyptians in 1986, but that it took time to check the information and seek evidence that the material was being used to build a poison gas plant.
Israeli experts agree with Swiss reports that Egypt now has not only the ability to produce nerve and mustard gas, but has actually been trying to produce a deadly nerve gas, Sarin.
A DILEMMA FOR U.S. OFFICIALS
But the managing director for the Swiss firm, Hans Weber, said in a radio interview that his company “did not have the slightest inkling” that the material supplied to Egypt was being used to build a poison gas plant.
In Washington, the U.S. State Department would not say Friday whether Egypt was intending to produce poison gas at the facility. Spokesman Charles Redman said the Krebs firm could be used for both civilian and military purposes.
News that Egypt may be involved in producing poison gas presents a dilemma for American officials, who have talked tough on the chemical weapons issue since it was reported that German companies and two American firms sold lethal chemicals to Libya, a country tied to state-sponsored terrorism and one with an avowed hatred of Israel.
Egypt, which has diplomatic ties to Israel, receives a large amount of American aid, second only to Israel.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid told an international conference on chemical warfare held in Paris in January that Egypt and the Arab states are entitled to possess chemical weapons, as long as Israel does not dismantle its suspected nuclear arsenal or open it to international inspection.
But Mohammed Wahby, the Egyptian Embassy spokesman in Washington, told the Times, “We are not involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons.”
Egypt has been able to produce chemical weapons, especially deadly poison gas, since the early 1960s. It used the gas extensively during the Egyptian intervention in Yemen under the leadership of the late Gamal Abdel Nasser, according to a report cited in the Times by Seth Carus, an expert at the Institute for Near East Policy in Washington.
It is believed those chemicals were obtained from the Soviet Union.
JAPANESE LINK DENIED
The Times also reported that Egypt supplied some of these chemical weapons to Syria before the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
In a related story, Japan denied Thursday a report that one of its aerospace firms installed equipment enabling Libya to store hundreds of poison gas bombs.
The Detroit News reported that Central Intelligence Agency officials told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 1 that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has assigned about 50 technicians and engineers at a desert chemical complex and had installed two production lines for making bomb canisters near Rabta, southwest of Tripoli.
Pentagon and congressional sources told the newspaper the Japanese technical experts installed two production lines for making bomb canisters that store the poison gas.
Libya maintains that the complex is used to produce only pharmaceuticals and pesticides.
(JTA correspondents Howard Rosenberg in Washington and Edwin Eytan in Paris contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
