Ihsan Barbouti, an Iraqi citizen living in Germany, in the 1980s approached several German firms and engineers, trying to buy technology and know-how to establish a secret nuclear weapons program in Libya, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported.

The man succeeded: Two years after organizing the sale of a German toxic gas factory to the Rabta industrial complex, he asked a German company to draft plans for a fuel processing plant, the daily said. Such a plant, by using nuclear fuel rods, could have produced enough plutonium to build a nuclear bomb.

The firm's engineers drafted the plans for a year, then put them on microfilm that was later smuggled to Libya via Brazil. The plant was never built, the daily said, citing information from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Association.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Moammar Gadhafi's agents tried to buy nuclear technology all over the world. Tripoli eventually succeeded when it became a customer of Abdul Qadeer Khan's secret nuclear proliferation ring in Pakistan.

In 2003, following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in nearby Iraq, Gadhafi announced that Libya had an active nuclear weapons program, but was willing to allow international inspectors into the country to observe and dismantle them. The dismantling is ongoing.