Germans Block ‘Dual Use’ Arms Gear Bound for Libya

German customs agents at the Frankfurt airport seized a shipment of American-made equipment bound for Libya that could have been used in a nuclear weapons program, a senior government official announced Wednesday.

Speaking at a routine news conference here, chief government spokesman Dieter Vogel said the customs agents made the seizure last month after they were tipped off by an international intelligence agency. The shipment, said to include laser components, had gone from the United States to Amsterdam and then to Frankfurt for the last leg of the journey to Libya.

Vogel declined to provide details on the intercepted goods or to name the intelligence agency involved.

But Reuters news service quoted unnamed German officials as saying that the equipment was seized at the request of the United States in a dramatic, last-minute action at Frankfurt airport. “The plane to Libya with the dubious cargo had already been cleared for takeoff and was on the runway when it was stopped,” the officials told Reuters.

Wednesday’s announcement in Bonn came only hours after Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Cabinet issued a decree barring the export of so-called “dual use” equipment to Libya. The decree was required because a broader draft law aimed at restricting exports to most countries from Germany of equipment that can be used for the production of nuclear or chemical weapons remains snarled in Parliament.

The legislation was proposed after Germany had been embarrassed often by revelations that German companies were instrumental in providing chemical weapons technology to Libya and Iraq. After the outbreak of the Gulf War, German technicians were found to have been heavily involved in Iraq’s chemical and nuclear arms programs and German companies were among the programs’ most important suppliers.

Meantime, the Libyan news agency JANA reported that Libya has said it will cooperate with the U.N. secretary general to resolve a dispute with the West over the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner and the 1989 downing of a French jetliner over Niger.

The JANA report, monitored by Reuters in Nicosia, Cyprus, was Libya’s first official reaction to a Security Council resolution approved Tuesday calling on Libya to surrender two agents accused of bombing the American jet over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, killing 270 people; 171 people were killed in the downing of the French jet. It did not say whether Libya would surrender the two men.