American tests showed no trace of nerve gas at 'deadly' Sudan plant. The President ordered the attack anyway
by Ed Vulliamy in Washington, Henry McDonald in Belfast , and Shyam Bhatia and Martin Bright
The Observer (London) August 23, 1998 - President Bill Clinton knew he was bombing a civilian target when he ordered the United States attack on a Sudan chemical plant. Tests ordered by him showed that no nerve gas was on the site and two British professionals who recently worked at the factory said it clearly had no military purpose.
The disclosure will deepen the crisis, following the American attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan, in relations between the US and its Muslim allies, who have called upon Clinton to produce hard evidence that the attacks had a legitimate relevance to the war against international terrorism.
The US claims that the Al-Shifa Pharmaceuticals Industries plant in North Khartoum was producing the ingredients for the deadly VX nerve gas. But Sudan's assertion that it produced 50 per cent of the country's drug requirements is much closer to the truth.
Several vital pieces of evidence point to this conclusion. US forces flew a reconnaissance mission to test for traces of gas and reported that there were none. Nevertheless Clinton immediately authorised the attack. He was also told that the absence of gas would avoid the horrifying spectacle of civilian casualties. Sudan has said 10 people were injured, five seriously.
Belfast independent film-maker Irwin Armstrong, who visited the plant last year while making a promotional video for the Sudanese ambassador in London, said: "The Americans have got this completely wrong.
"In other parts of the country I encountered heavy security but not here. I was allowed to wander about quite freely. This is a perfectly normal chemical factory with the things you would expect - stainless steel vats and technicians."
Tom Carnaffin, of Hexham, Northumberland, worked as a technical manager from 1992 to 1996 for the Baaboud family, who own the plant.
"I have intimate knowledge of that factory and it just does not lend itself to the manufacture of chemical weapons," he said.
"The Americans claimed that the weapons were being manufactured in the veterinary part of the factory. I have intimate knowledge of that part of the [plant] and unless there have been some radical changes in the last few months, it just isn't equipped to cope with the demands of chemical weapon manufacturing.
"You need things like airlocks but this factory just has doors leading out onto the street. The factory was in the process of being sold to a Saudi Arabian. They are allies of the Americans and I don't think it would look very good in the prospectus that the factory was also manufacturing weapons for Baghdad.
"I have personal knowledge of the need for medicine in Sudan as I almost died while working out there. The loss of this factory is a tragedy for the rural communities who need those medicines."
The engineer, who has said he will be returning to Sudan in the near future to carry out more work for the Baaboud family, condemned the American attack and its resulting loss of life.
"It's a funny feeling to think that I had a cup of tea in that place and the security guard on the gate who used to say hello to me is very probably now dead. The Baabouds are absolutely gutted about this. People who they knew personally have been killed - it is very upsetting."
Meanwhile, an assurance that British targets will not be included in any retaliatory strikes has come from sources close to Osama bin Laden, the multimillionaire Saudi fundamentalist believed to be behind the twin bombings of US embassies in East Africa.
Bin Laden, who survived the American air-strikes on his training camp inside Afghanistan, telephoned the editor of the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al Quds al Arabi to declare he was only interested in hitting the US and Israel.
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by David Hirst in Khartoum
The Observer (London) August 23, 1998 - Whatever Al Shifa Pharmaceuticals Industries Company did produce - precursors for the VX nerve gas, according to the United States, or 50 per cent of Sudan's drug requirements, according to its own staff - it was very precisely targeted indeed.
The projectiles that smashed into it at about 7.30 local time on Thursday evening went unerringly to the heart of the plant, and nothing else - not even the Sweets and Sesame factory so physically close that, at first sight it looks like an integral part.
Al Shifa certainly did not try to hide its existence. Signs in plenty direct you to it long before you get there. But to find it with such pinpoint accuracy from the air was no small achievement.
The Khartoum North district in which it is located is an amorphous, dismal suburbia, semi-residential, semi-industrial without obvious landmarks; steeped in dust for most of the year, its largely unpaved roads and alleyways ankle-deep in the rainy season's mud.
The factory's core is flattened. The roof is almost on the ground. Here and there smoke still rises from the debris; the still burning chemicals give it a mildy unpleasant odour. There is no sign amid the wreckage of anything sinister. Of course, for the layman, there probably wouldn't be anyway.
But there is no sign of anyone trying to hide anything either. Access is easy. Much of Khartoum seems to have come to take a look. Women in long bright dresses, and even high heels, pick their way through the mud and jump across roadside gutters to get a closer view. Most stare in what seems to be disbelieving silence.
"I still can't quite believe it's gone," said Dr Alamaddin Shibli, the factory's export manager. "I still have to knock my head into realising that when I come here I'm coming to a complete ruin." He pointed to his office on the third floor of the administrative building. "On Thursday, I had gone home earlier than I usually do." He was not the only lucky one. "If the Americans had chosen Wednesday evening, instead of Thursday, it would have been a disaster."
About 300 people worked in the factory, he said, but on Wednesday evening a shift of 50 had been working on a special assignment of veterinary products.
These were destined for Iraq, commissioned by the United Nations under its food-for-oil programme. "I suppose the Americans would say that one Arab producer of chemical weapons was supplying them to another - Saddam Hussein."
He says the factory was one of the biggest and best of its kind in Africa. It was privately owned, and had changed hands since it went into production two years ago; the new owner was a Sudanese living in Saudi Arabia. It had been partly financed by the Eastern and Southern African Preferential Trade Association, a thoroughly respectable body.
It produced the full range of antibiotics, medicines for malaria, rheumatism, tuberculosis and diabetes, you name it. Samples of its products lay around the reception area: Shifatryp, Shifamol, and in a plastic bag with the picture of an eagle on it, Shifacef proclaimed its Continued Efficiency Over the Years.
Apart from the administration block, only two parts of the factory were not unrecognisably demolished. One was the water-cooling works, which Shibli called the most modern in Africa, with its equipment from Italy and the United States. The other was the laboratory - for him, the most important loss. It is very badly damaged, but amid the rubble rows of phials remained discernibly intact.
The Sudanese government, which the US accuses of sponsoring international terrorism, seems to think it now has all the evidence it needs to incriminate the US. It wants a United Nations team to investigate.
"This is what we will show them," Shibli said. "In those bottles are the reagents that will prove what we really produced here - and it wasn't chemical weapons."
Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998
Source The Guardian / The Observer -
http://reports.guardian.co.uk
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[posted August 25, 1998]
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