Switzerland's government yesterday defended its plan to destroy a second set of sensitive documents obtained during the investigation of three Swiss nationals who allegedly supported a major nuclear smuggling network, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, July 1).
"There are no grounds ... to reverse its decision, which takes into account in a measured manner the needs of the prosecuting authorities and Switzerland's international engagements," the government said in a release. "From the point of view of security policies, it is imperative that the most sensitive documents, which detail the making of nuclear weapons, are destroyed."
A Swiss parliamentary committee that recently challenged the legality of the decision "certainly did not have the competence ... to issue such orders to the government," the statement says.
Particularly sensitive papers would be replaced by "an insert" that "gives an indication of the contents of the missing pages," the government indicated, noting that the procedure "conforms to the demands of security policies."
Legislators and investigators criticized Switzerland's elimination of some of the papers in 2007, contending that the move destroyed important evidence needed to prosecute members of the Tinner family. The men, all engineers, are suspected of assisting the black market operation once operated by top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The government said that it eliminated the documents "to prevent them from falling into the hands of a terrorist organization or nonauthorized state."
Some reports, though, indicated that the family members were CIA affiliates working to subvert nuclear development in Iran and Libya, and that Switzerland destroyed the documents to avoid exposing the engineers' ties to the U.S. intelligence community (see GSN, Jan. 22; Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, July 1).