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Man Gets 3 Years for Sales Linked to Nuclear Arms

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Times Staff Writer

A federal judge sentenced black market trader Asher Karni to three years in prison Thursday, saying he wanted to warn others that the illegal sale of U.S. high-tech products could help foreign governments or terrorists obtain nuclear weapons.

After hearing Karni apologize for selling blacklisted U.S. electronic components to companies in Pakistan and India, U.S. District Judge Richard M. Urbina told the former Israeli army major that no amount of contrition could make up for the potential threat posed by his actions.

“I want you to know how serious I think your conduct was,” Urbina told Karni, emphasizing that he was sentencing him to a prison term longer than that requested by his defense lawyers to send a message to the public.

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Citing Karni’s extensive cooperation in an ongoing nuclear trafficking investigation, lawyers for the South Africa-based businessman had sought a 19-month sentence. That would have freed Karni immediately because he has been in federal custody since his arrest Jan. 1, 2004, at Denver International Airport.

Urbina shaved six years off the maximum term Karni could have received under complex federal sentencing guidelines, saying he was doing so because of Karni’s cooperation.

But the judge said he was deeply troubled by Karni’s central role in a conspiracy to sell U.S. high-tech components to firms in Pakistan and India that Washington believes are part of those countries’ nuclear-weapons and missile programs.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Jay I. Bratt told the judge that Karni sold blacklisted products to entities in Pakistan and India on at least 17 occasions, a much larger number than authorities had previously disclosed.

Bratt, a veteran prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office transnational/major crimes section, described the Karni case as perhaps the most serious threat to national security that he has encountered.

Urbina said he was most alarmed by Karni’s admitted use in 2003 of a web of intermediaries to buy 200 precision electrical switches, known as triggered spark gaps, from a Massachusetts firm and then ship them to a business associate in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

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At the time, Urbina said, Karni and the associate, Humayun Khan, knew that the U.S. government prohibited the sale of the components to Pakistan because of their potential use in detonating nuclear warheads. The two men went to great lengths to camouflage the end user, the judge said.

But two Commerce Department agents had received a tip from an informant in South Africa and were monitoring the shipment. They disabled the first shipment of 66 spark gaps before Karni received them and forwarded them to Khan, and later used Karni’s cooperation to obtain a grand jury indictment of the Islamabad arms merchant, who had close ties to the Pakistani military.

Khan, who is no relation to Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who operated a global network that smuggled nuclear technology, has denied wrongdoing in interviews with the Los Angeles Times. U.S. authorities would not say Thursday whether they had requested his extradition from Pakistan. Pakistani officials also have had no comment on the case, except to deny trying to illegally purchase U.S. technology for their nuclear weapons program.

Bratt said in court Thursday that the U.S. government still did not know for whom Khan was purchasing the spark gaps or where the disabled components were.

But Bratt told the judge that the buyer was either the government of Pakistan and its nuclear program, another country that Pakistan was secretly helping with its nuclear program or a Pakistani political organization that supported “jihadist elements” or other rogue groups.

“The choices for the true recipient of the triggered spark gaps are not comforting,” Bratt said.

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He also told Urbina that, based on wiretapped conversations with several of his employees, Karni appeared to have tried to continue his trafficking operations even while in federal custody after his arrest.

Urbina, like Bratt, stopped short of specifically identifying the Islamabad government as the end user of the components Karni sent to Pakistan.

But he said unnamed foreign governments and terrorists “have become incredibly creative in finding ways to wreak death and destruction. These are incredibly malevolent people who wish to be armed with very bad things,” such as nuclear weapons.

In the courtroom for Karni’s sentencing were the two Commerce Department agents who have been investigating him and his alleged co-conspirators for the last two years.

The agents, James Brigham and David Poole, said they could not comment on the case or on their continuing investigation, for which they have tried to travel to Pakistan to conduct interviews.

They and others have been unable to do so, authorities have confirmed, in part because the departments of Commerce and Homeland Security have failed to gain adequate support from within the Bush administration to pressure Pakistan into letting them in the country.

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