LONDON: Pakistan's Khan Research Laboratories, which was founded by nuclear scientist A Q Khan, had clandestinely supplied centrifuge components to a nuclear plant intended to be installed in Libya, a new book has claimed.While the centrifuge components were first sent from Kahuta in Pakistan to Vanderbijlpark in South Africa before forwarding them to Tripoli, "the Libyans showed their visitors canisters at the Al Fallah storage facility in Tripoli that contained 1.7tons of UF6 gas from Pakistan, a gift to get the Libyan enrichment factory up and running," the book "Deception": Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy" stated.

The 586-page book is authored by investigative journalists, Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, who worked as staff writers and foreign correspondents for The Sunday Times before joining The Guardian.An Anglo-American investigating team also discovered worrying evidence that some of what Pakistan had exported had gone missing en route from Dubai to Tripoli.

Two shipping containers, one filled with centrifuge components and a ton of high-strength aluminum, the other containing precision tools and parts for two specialized lathes, had last been seen in Turkey and Malaysia shortly before the BBC China container seizure.According to the book, in the early hours of December 12, 2003, as a Mi6-CIA team (British and American Intelligence team) walked out to their unmarked plane at Tripoli airport, Libyan officials rushed on to the tarmac.

They handed over half a dozen brown envelopes. Inside one were blueprints for a nuclear bomb. Another contained instructions on how to manufacture and assemble a device. They were written in a mixture of English and Chinese.