Nations Should Refuse to Help Libya Rebuild Plant, U.S. Says : Foreign policy: Cheney attributes the fire to incompetence. Kadafi has ‘had better weeks,’ he says.

The Bush Administration called on other industrial nations Friday to deny Libya the technology and equipment it will need to rebuild the fire-damaged factory suspected of producing poison gas.

“We (will) make known publicly and through our diplomatic channels to everyone we can how seriously we view this plant,” said State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler. “It is in no one’s interest to see the plant rebuilt.”

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, in a taunt directed at Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, suggested that the fire was the result of blunders by Libyan workers instead of sabotage, as Kadafi has charged.

“I am inclined to attribute it more to Libyan incompetence than anything else,” Cheney said. Referring to Kadafi, Cheney added: “He’s had better weeks, let’s put it that way.”

The Rabta plant, about 60 miles southwest of Tripoli, was damaged extensively and apparently put out of operation by a fire that began Wednesday night.

The factory was built largely by a West German chemical company, Imhausen-Chemie, and U.S. officials are convinced that Libya will be unable to repair it without Western technological assistance.

Although Kadafi has insisted that the facility was designed to produce pharmaceuticals, U.S. officials said earlier this month that it had begun to produce limited supplies of deadly mustard gas and nerve gas.

Tutwiler said the Administration has no idea how the fire started and repeated denials that the U.S. government had anything to do with it.

But a well-informed, non-government source said that the Libyan plant was sabotaged by the French and German secret services. He said a “senior French intelligence officer” confided that the French had been sabotaging Libyan industry for years because of Libya’s role in the war in Chad, a former French colony.

Kadafi, in a statement broadcast by Tripoli Radio on Thursday, said his government is investigating charges that West German intelligence agents had a role in the blaze. He threatened to retaliate if he determined that the accusations were true.

In Bonn, Foreign Ministry spokesman Juergen Chrobog denied West German involvement and warned Kadafi not to take action against the 1,000 or so West German citizens living in Libya.

“The federal government decisively rejects the Libyan attempt to blame the Federal Republic of Germany for the fire at Rabta,” Chrobog said, according to news agency accounts. “We especially denounce any attempt to rouse up Libyans against us.”

Another government official in Bonn said on condition of anonymity that it appeared that Kadafi blamed West Germany for the fire because of Bonn’s efforts to promote an international outcry against the plant.

Cheney said Washington was sensitive to the Libyan threats against West Germany, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But he indicated that Kadafi would be unable to follow through.

“If I were the Germans, I don’t think I’d be quaking in my boots about it,” he said.

State Department officials said that when the plant began producing limited quantities of poison gas earlier this month, Washington renewed a diplomatic campaign to cut off the supply of Western assistance.

Those diplomatic contacts would be intensified as a result of the fire, the officials said.

“Now that this fire has happened, we will obviously be strongly stating, ‘Please . . . don’t anyone do anything to enable it to be rebuilt,’ ” Tutwiler said.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said it appears that the Libyan plant is “out of business” as a result of the fire.

“I don’t think we can say for certain . . . but we do think some very extensive and serious damage has been done,” Fitzwater said.

U.S. officials scoffed at Kadafi’s claims that the plant is a pharmaceutical facility, noting that its large size, remote location and heavy security are inconsistent with that explanation.

Also, officials said, the U.S. government has solid intelligence information about the purpose of the plant.

At the time the Rabta facility was discovered in late 1988, the U.S. government protested to West Germany about the involvement of German firms. Bonn at first denied any improper activity, but later accepted U.S. evidence about the nature.

Times staff writers Melissa Healy and John M. Broder contributed to this report.