Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 13, 1990 TAG: 9004130274
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
After weapons experts spent the day examining the shipment of eight crates at a dock in Middlesborough in northeast England, the customs department announced it would seize the tubes, citing British regulations banning arms shipments to either Iraq or Iran.
The announcement brought heated denials of wrongdoing from both Iraq and the British company that manufactured the tubes, and heightened speculation that President Saddam Hussein's government is seeking ways of firing shells or rockets at Iran or Israel.
The episode also increased speculation about the apparently professional slaying last month of Canadian scientist John Bull, one of the world's foremost experts on long-range artillery systems. His Belgium-based firm had engineering contracts to help perfect Iraq's long-range conventional artillery system, and there are suggestions he might have been killed by agents of Iran or Israel to thwart a monster gun project.
If fitted together, the eight pieces could form a smooth-bore gun barrel that is 1,000 millimeters wide and 130 feet long, which easily would be the largest in the world, according to armaments experts.
Azmi Shafiq Salihi, Iraq's ambassador to the United Kingdom, told reporters the tubes were for petrochemical piping and denied they had any military application. He said the whole episode was part of a smear campaign that began after Iraq last month executed British free-lance journalist Farzad Bazoft for espionage.
A few days later, on March 28, five people were arrested and 40 U.S.-made electronic devices on their way to Baghdad were seized in a joint U.S.-British customs raid. Officials said the devices were capable of detonating nuclear weapons. Iraq denied the triggers were to be used militarily.
"This is the second ring in the chain of a political and media campaign against my country," Salihi said Thursday, adding that "if this campaign continues, it will be against your interests."
The British company that made the tubes, Sheffield Forgemasters, insisted they were petrochemical pipes with no possible military use. It said Britain's Department of Trade and Industry had given written approval for the manufacture of the tubes and their sale to Iraq.
Thursday's customs finding that the parts could have military application raised more questions than it answered, according to arms experts.
They questioned where Baghdad might have purchased the other components of such a massive gun, including the huge projectiles it would need to fire. Some also asked why Iraq would seek to develop such a massive and potentially unpredictable weapon when it already has aircraft and is developing medium-range missiles capable of delivering payloads against either Iran or Israel.
Some of the answers may have centered on Bull, who was shot twice in the head and three times in the back outside his Brussels hotel on March 22. In the early 1960s, Bull headed a joint Canadian-American program that attempted to develop a massive artillery gun as a means of helping boost missiles into space.
by CNB