Leaked Saudi Document: Iran Shipped Centrifuges to Sudan
Top secret Saudi memo leaked by Wikileaks contends that Iran shipped nuclear equipment to Sudan, a key route to Hamas.
By Yaakov Levi
First Publish: 6/23/2015, 7:41 PM
Iranian centrifuges in Natanz
Reuters
A top secret Saudi memo contends that Iran shipped nuclear equipment to Sudan, in a shocking leak that comes ahead of a June 30 deadline for Iran nuclear talks with world powers.
The revelation was part of a huge trove of documents published on the Wikileaks web site. The trove of 60,000 documents was published last week, with the bulk of them said to be secret communications between the government in Riyadh and Saudi embassies around the world.
Among the documents, for example, is one that claims that a group of students from Saudi Arabia and a number of other Gulf states visited the Israeli Embassy in Washington as part of an international education program. Saudi Arabia has denied the veracity of the documents, saying that most of them were “probably faked.”
In a document publicized Tuesday, Saudi diplomats in Khartoum said that Iran may have shipped equipment, including centrifuges needed to create fuel for nuclear weapons, to Sudan in 2012.
“The embassy's sources advised that Iranian containers arrived this week at Khartoum airport containing sensitive technical equipment in the form of fast centrifuges for enriching uranium, and a second shipment is expected to arrive this week,” Reuters quoted the documents as saying.
The document does not provide details on how the equipment might have been shipped, or what Sudan planned to do with it. It also did not supply further evidence of the shipment.
The Iranian-Sudanese alliance
Iran has been developing its nuclear program with help from the rogue nuclear power North Korea, and has threatened to use advanced centrifuges after a deal is reached that would allow it to obtain a nuclear arsenal within weeks.The repressive Islamic regime in Sudan, led by President Omar al-Bashir who is wanted for his role in the Darfur massacre, has been an important ally of Iran.
Last March, IDF forces seized the Klos C in waters off the shores of Sudan, which was smuggling a massive weapons shipment from Iran to Hamas.
A top Israeli defense official said back in 2012 that Sudan "serves as a route for the transfer, via Egyptian territory, of Iranian weapons to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists." Iranian warships regularly dock in Port Sudan, in what Khartoum describes as “routine” visits.
The new batch of 60,000 documents, according to WikiLeaks, include embassy communications, emails between diplomats and reports from other official state departments and organizations.
The international organization, which publishes secret and classified information as well as news leaks, says this first batch of 60,000 documents is the lead up to the eventual release of some half a million Saudi documents it has obtained.
WikiLeaks would not say from where it had collected the documents.
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