Sudan: International investigators and western intelligence have named Sudan as a major conduit for sophisticated engineering equipment that could be used in nuclear weapons programmes.
Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment was imported into the African country over a three-year period before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 - this has since disappeared.
Western governments, UN detectives, and international analysts trying to stem the illicit trade in weapons of mass destruction technology are alarmed by the black market trade.
A European intelligence assessment says Sudan has been using front companies and third countries to import machine tools, gauges and hi-tech processing equipment from western Europe for its military industries.
But it says Sudan is also being used as a conduit, as much of the equipment is too sophisticated for the country.
"Among the equipment purchased by Sudan, there are dual-use goods whose use in Sudan appears implausible because of their high technological standard," says the assessment.
Western analysts and intelligence agencies suspect the equipment has been or is being traded by the nuclear proliferation racket headed by the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who admitted nuclear trading two years ago and is under house arrest in Islamabad.
Khan is known to have visited Sudan between 1998 and 2002.
The suspicion is he may have used the country as a warehouse for the hi-tech engineering equipment he was selling to Libya, Iran and North Korea for the assembly of centrifuges for enriching uranium. This is the most common way of building a nuclear bomb. - (Guardian Service)