Unearthing Gaddafi’s chemical weapon claims

Libya’s rebels have Colonel Gaddafi‘s fighters cornered, with only a few towns still loyal to the former leader across Libya. His loyalists are sworn to fight or die in his name.

But Channel 4 News met an undercover agent who claims an informant in the inner circle of the former “brother leader” warned him that if it ever came to this endpoint, Gaddafi would be at his most lethal.

He said: “He just looked at me and laughed and said you know the Brits and the Americans know exactly what Gaddafi has – he has this, this and that of chemical weapons and he will use them.”

This Libyan agent said he posed as a Gaddafi loyalist and spied for Nato as he told us of his secret war. He showed us intelligence reports he’d filed on troop and ammunition movements, targets and Gaddafi’s efforts to acquire chemical munitions.

Documents we obtained last week at an abandoned Gaddafi military base recorded shipments, between April and July, of brand new chemical warfare suits and decontamination kits to key Gaddafi strongholds such as Sirte. Receipts showed they’d arrived.

What we now know from our intelligence contact in Tripoli is that the orders to send those chemical protection suits and kits to Sirte and al-Juffra came directly from Muammar Gaddafi himself.

We know this because the agent claims that back in May, he met a very senior top-level regime source who informed him that shipments exactly matching the descriptions in our documents were ordered to be dispatched to Gaddafi’s forces.

As I drove round Tripoli with our secret agent, he told me how for five years he’d cultivated regime figures-turned informants; their mission: to save Libya from Gaddafi.

“Their ranks are high within the Gaddafi regime. Over the years I’ve developed a relationship where they would trust me,” he said.

He took me to a facility on which he’d filed intelligence. It had not been bombed, but there was a bunker, as described, full of incinerated documents. And in the basement of a nearby building, what had been a weapons cache for Gaddafi forces stationed there.

We moved on to another target he said he’d identified.

Among the documents which our contact filed to intelligence agencies in Nato member countries, was a map. And at the bottom it shows a clearly demarcated compound belong to the Moatassem Brigade, an elite unit. And an annotation saying: “Here there are rockets”.

We went to the map’s location and found a bombed out site. There were rockets, all right. A terrifying arsenal, bombed to smithereens by Nato warplanes.

Missiles like the remains we had found had clearly posed a threat, but our agent was to learn of something much more sinister from his key regime informant. He told us: “I received a call from the Gaddafi source himself asking to drop by and have a cup of coffee.

“He was talking about chemical weapons and Gaddafi had chemical weapons and he was going to use these weapons pretty soon if he lost control of Tripoli itself.”

Delivery systems for 11 tonnes of poison gas still known to have been in Gaddafi’s possession when civil war broke were to have been destroyed as part of his international rehabilitation. But the agent was told that foreign military technicians had been in Libya for months, contracted to weaponise his stocks of mustard gas and sarin.

“A handful, a dozen maybe – men, women Russian, Ukranian. You could spot them, they were easily noticed,” he told us.

We asked him how many contacts he heard about these scientists from.

“Two contacts, that I fully trust when they provide information,” he said.

He confirmed that he was told completely independently with the same descriptions. It isn’t known whether the technicians, whom he often observed in an upmarket coffee shop, ever did weaponise Gaddafi’s chemicals. But what did the agent think would happen if they did?

“He’s crazy enough to use it, that’s one thing,” he told us. “He held onto Libya for 42 years. And he built this massive military power – not to defend Libya but to defend himself from the Libyans.”