Doubts grow over Sudan missile raid

THE UNITED STATES is under mounting pressure to produce fuller evidence to support its claim that the factory it bombed in Khartoum was in fact involved in manufacturing chemical weapons, rather than medicines and drugs desperately needed by one of the poorest countries on earth.

In the days since cruise missiles devastated El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Co factory in the north-east of the Sudanese capital on 20 August, international doubts have only grown about the justification for the raid.

Despite protest to the contrary, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, was said to have been very unhappy at the raid. Now fresh doubts are coming from Germany, hitherto - like Britain - a staunch official supporter of President Bill Clinton over the incident.

Yesterday, the German foreign ministry declined to comment on reports in Der Spiegel news magazine and the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that within hours of the attack its envoy in Khartoum was reporting that the plant was not making chemical weapons.

Even if they are true, however, the conclusions of Werner Daum, the ambassador, would merely corroborate earlier statements by Westerners familiar with the plant, almost all of them profoundly sceptical of Washington's claims that it was helping make deadly agents like VX gas.

Thus far, the crux of the public case from the US is a soil sample from just outside the factory, which Washington insists contains traces of Empta, a precursor chemical for VX. This would have ultimately found its way into the hands of Osama bin Laden, the alleged terrorist mastermind who plotted the 7 August attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and is said to have financed the Sudan plant.

But even some American experts now say tests establishing the presence of Empta are inherently unreliable, and that more than one sample should have been analysed. And US officials are now quoted as saying it is not clear whether Empta was produced at the factory.

On the other hand, for Sudan, a government accused of sponsoring international terrorism and embroiled in a cruel civil war in the country's south, the affair has offered a rare chance of attracting foreign sympathy - and not surprisingly it is seizing it to the utmost.

At the weekend, Khartoum repeated its demand that a United Nations mission, or "neutral" American figures ,such as Jesse Jackson or the former president Jimmy Carter, inspect the site. "It's not difficult to investigate," taunted the Sudanese Foreign Minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, on his way to yesterday's summit in Durban of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was expected to condemn the US repri- sals. "The factory is there, it has been closed from the day it was bombarded."

Washington is thus being pushed towards an awkward choice - either to make public more evidence backing up its claims, or to permit an outside investigation that seems most unlikely to do so. The current tactic of doing nothing risks only inflaming feelings in the Arab world and heightening suspicions that the raids were a crude attempt to divert attention from the Monica Lewinsky affair.

US officials, therefore, have been trying to square the circle, reiterating that they have "solid" evidence, but hinting that to divulge it would tip off terrorists to some of the methods it used to track them. If so, then the dilemma is similar to that over the Rosenbergs, executed 45 years ago amid bitter controversy on charge of passing atomic secrets to Moscow.

In fact, the evidence that nailed them came when US cryptologists decoded top- secret traffic from the Soviet UN mission in New York. But to have produced transcripts would have revealed to Moscow that its cipher had been broken.