
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 23, 1990                   TAG: 9003231831
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LONDON                                 LENGTH: Medium

CZECHS ADMIT SELLING LIBYA TONS OF EXPLOSIVE

Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel Thursday disclosed that his country's former Communist regime supplied the Libyan government of Col. Moammar Gadhafi with 1,000 tons of Semtex, the odorless, virtually undetectable explosive that has become the world's most lethal terrorist weapon.

"The past regime exported 1,000 tons to Libya," Havel said at a news conference during his first official visit here. "If you consider that 200 grams is enough to blow up an aircraft, this means world terrorism has enough Semtex to last 150 years."

His statement was the first time Czech officials have acknowledged exporting the yellowish plastic explosive to Libya. Havel added that his government was "unable to make Libya return the Semtex."

Paul Wilkinson, director of the London-based Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, said the amount shipped is "a surprisingly high number - considerably more than those of us who study, who work in this field had assumed."

Wilkinson and other experts said the official figure could grossly underestimate the actual amount of Semtex that has been supplied not only to Gadhafi's government but also to countries such as Syria, North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Some experts have put the worldwide figure as high as 40,000 tons and contend Czechoslovakia may have produced two to three times the 100 tons per month that officials there have claimed.

"We have to assume that the official records do not give the full details of black market deals that must have gone on between some of the people in the government and middlemen," Wilkinson said. "It's very likely that there's a hell of a lot of this stuff around the world."

Semtex was sold abroad not for profit but "on political orders which came from above," Havel said. "The absurd part of the matter is that Czechoslovakia did not make money out of it."

The former dissident playwright, who took office in January after Czechoslovakia's Stalinist regime collapsed under popular pressure, said his government had stopped exporting the explosive last month and would not resume sales until the manufacturer added chemical "markers" that would give Semtex a telltale odor.

But Havel said his country would continue to manufacture Semtex for industrial use. "This is an industrial explosive necessary for various industrial purposes," he said. "It is not an explosive made especially for terrorists."

Havel said other countries manufacture Semtex-like products and that he believed Czechoslovakia sometimes was wrongly blamed for terrorist attacks. But many experts say Semtex, which Czechoslovakia has produced for the past two decades at a factory in Semtin, about 50 miles east of Prague, is by far the best of its kind.

The pliable explosive is easy to use, can be molded into any shape and cannot be detected by X-ray machines or sniffer dogs. It is also extraordinarily powerful. Scottish investigators believe a few ounces packed in a cassette recorder were responsible for the midair destruction of Pan Am Flight 103, a 747 jumbo jet that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 270 people.

by CNB