By Harvey Morris
Middle East Editor

LIBYA has shipped a consignment of nerve gas to Somalia, prompting fears that it may be used against anti-government guerrillas, the Parliamentary Human Rights Group said yesterday.

The chairman of the all-party group, Lord Avebury, said in a telex to the United Nations that he had an eyewitness report from Mogadishu airport that containers of nerve gas were off-loaded there from a Libyan air force plane on 7 October. He said the consignment of the nerve gas agents Sarin and Soman was transferred to a warehouse at the northern end of the runway.

He noted that the UN had so far failed to take positive action against Iraq for using chemical weapons and appealed to the UN Secretary-General, Javier Perez de Cueller, to take pre-emptive measures to prevent a catastrophe in Somalia. Lord Avebury said the Somali army was heavily engaged in fighting guerrilla forces in the north of the country and that the rebels had had some recent military successes. “In these circumstances, we have every reason to fear that, like the Iraqis, the Somali government can use these chemical weapons against a minority with whom they are in conflict.”

Lord Avebury’s claim follows allegations in Washington earlier this year that Libya was on the verge of full-scale production of chemical weapons. A spokesman for the Parliamentary Rights Group, however, said that the nerve gases sent to Somalia came originally from Soviet stockpiles.

In September, the State Department spokesman, Charles Redman, said the United States believed Colonel Gaddafi was seeking an arsenal of chemical weapons and had completed a weapons plant. He declined to specify what types of weapons Libya was thought to be producing. The NBC television network, however, subsequently reported that Libya planned to make nerve gas and that it would soon be able to produce large amounts of mustard gas at a plant 50 miles from Tripoli.

The Somali government, which receives aid from the US in return for the use of military bases, has been fighting a seven-year war against guerrillas of the Somali National Movement seeking to overthrow President Mohamed Siyad Barre. SNM guerrillas are now hiding out in open country after being driven from the towns of Hargeysa and Burao in heavy fighting in May and June.

Iraqis is believed to be the only country that has actually used nerve agents, although chemical weapons have been deployed in a number of conflicts since the First World War.

This article was reproduced from THE INDEPENDENT newspaper, Great Britain, Wednesday, November 23, 1988.