“It’s a big breakthrough,” said Paul F. Walker, an arms control expert with the environmental group Green Cross International who has helped in efforts to demilitarize the American and Russian chemical weapons stockpiles since the 1990s. “Even though Libya’s chemical stockpile was relatively small, the effort to destroy it was very difficult because of weather, geography and because it’s a dangerous area with warring tribes, increasing the risks of theft and diversion,” he said. 
 
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 Libya’s last two tons of chemical weapons were dwarfed by the 1,300 tons that Syria has agreed to destroy. But American and international arms experts say the need for easily transportable and efficient technology to wipe out the Libyan arms became a model for the Syria program now underway. 
 
 For Libya’s fragile transitional government, such collaboration with the West on security matters is a delicate issue. It gives the country’s leaders desperately needed assistance to defuse internal threats, but also risks accusations of compromising national sovereignty. 
 
 Asked about the American efforts to destroy the chemical weapons, Libyan security officials in Tripoli initially issued sweeping denials. One later briefly acknowledged the operation on the condition of anonymity, and then officials stopped returning phone calls. 
 
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 On Sunday, the White House said that it would ensure that the Syrian government complied with an accord to give up its chemical arsenal despite missed deadlines and delays in carrying out the deal. 
 
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 The White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation” that the deal was “not falling apart, but we would like to see it proceed much more quickly than it is.” 
 
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 The disposal of the last of Libya’s chemical weapons closes a chapter that Colonel Qaddafi began in early 2004, when his government turned over a vast cache of nuclear technology and chemical stockpiles to the United States, Britain and international nuclear inspectors. 
 
 At that time, Libya declared for destruction 24.7 metric tons of sulfur mustard, a syrupy liquid that when loaded into bombs or artillery shells and exploded creates a toxic mist that penetrates clothing, burns and blisters exposed skin, and can kill with large doses or if left untreated. The chemical was used extensively in World War I. 
 
 Libya had destroyed about half of these stocks when civil war broke out in 2011. Western spy agencies closely monitored the destruction site in the Libyan desert to ensure the stockpiles were not pilfered by insurgents. 
 
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 When the new government took control in Tripoli that fall, it signaled its intent to finish the job. Libyan officials also surprised Western inspectors by announcing the discovery in November 2011 and February 2012 of two hidden caches of mustard, or nearly two tons, that had not been declared by Colonel Qaddafi’s government. That brought the total declared amount of chemical to 26.3 tons. 
 
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 Unlike the majority of Libya’s mustard agents, which were stored in large, bulky containers, the new caches were already armed and loaded into 517 artillery shells, 45 plastic sleeves for rocket launchings and eight 500-pound bombs. 
 
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 The new stockpiles immediately posed huge challenges for the fledgling Libyan government, which had no ability to destroy the combat-ready chemical weapons, as well as for its American and European allies called upon to help. 
 
 The disposal site is deep in the desert, in an area where Islamist militants hostile to the West wield growing influence. It also sits on the front line of the struggle between Libya’s eastern and western provinces over political power and oil revenue. A defining issue in post-Qaddafi politics, the regional rivalry has often spilled out into armed blockades of the national highways and crucial oil-export terminals as well. 
 
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 Using $45 million from the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which has helped rid the former Soviet Union of thousands of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon and its Defense Threat Reduction Agency tapped the Parsons Corporation, a construction firm based in Pasadena, Calif., to work with Libya to oversee the rebuilding and safeguarding of the Libyan disposal site, which had been ransacked during the civil war. 
 
 Remarkably, the mustard agents stored in bulk containers at the site were untouched and their inspection seals unbroken, American and international officials said. These have all been destroyed, too. 
 
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 Canada donated $6 million to help restore water, sewage service and electricity to the site, and to build living quarters for Western and Libyan contractors. Germany agreed to fly international inspectors to the site. 
 
 The project has relied on a custom-built device from Dynasafe, a Swedish company, to destroy the weapons. It is essentially a giant, high-tech oven called a static-detonation chamber. The munitions were fed through an automated loading system into a gas-tight chamber, where the toxic materials were vaporized at temperatures between 750 and 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Gases created in the process were scrubbed by special filters. 
 
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 “The destruction of these munitions was a major undertaking in arduous, technically challenging circumstances,” Ahmet Uzumcu, the director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, whose inspectors supervised the destruction of the chemical weapons, said in a written statement. 
 
 Although American officials acknowledge that Libya is awash with conventional arms, they expressed confidence that the vast Libyan desert holds no other secret caches of unconventional arms for jihadis to exploit. 
 
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 Andrew C. Weber, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, said, “This is the culmination of a major international effort to eliminate weapons of mass destruction from Libya and to ensure that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.” ||||| Image copyright Other 
 
 Since Muammar Gaddafi's ignominious death at the hands of a rebel mob in October 2011 much has been written and said about him. But now a new film, with unprecedented access to those close to Gaddafi, provides a comprehensive study of Libya's brutal and contradictory long-time leader. 
 
 Ali Aujali, Gaddafi's former ambassador to the United States, is an exceptionally charming man. 
 
 Gaddafi and the airliners Image copyright AFP Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York destroyed by a bomb on 21 December 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people 
 
 Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (pictured), was jailed for the bombing in 2001, released in August 2009 suffering from cancer and died in May 2012 
 
 On 9 September 1989 UTA flight 772 was travelling from Brazzaville to Paris when it was blown up over the Sahara desert. All 156 passengers and 14 crew members were killed 
 
 In 1999 a French court found six Libyans guilty in absentia of planting a bomb and sentenced them to life imprisonment 
 
 On 22 December 1992 - four years and a day after Lockerbie - 157 people died when a Libyan airliner disintegrated as it came in to land in Tripoli 
 
 There have been calls for the crash to be reinvestigated and now Ali Aujali has claimed Gaddafi was responsible The Gaddafi family tree UTA 772 memorial seen from space 
 
 He is also something of a magician. He began his career in the Libyan diplomatic service a couple of years after Gaddafi seized power in 1969. 
 
 In a series of postings from London to Latin America, he explained away the excesses of the Gaddafi regime. So I was rather surprised to sit with Mr Aujali surrounded by the staggeringly ornate Libyan embassy in Washington and hear him tear the colonel to pieces. 
 
 Mr Aujali defected to the rebels in February 2011 and became their ambassador to the United States. 
 
 According to him, there was literally nothing good about the man whose regime he had served most of his adult life. 
 
 Secret after secret spilled out. We checked as many of his claims as we could. 
 
 There were anecdotes we could not follow up, such as his claim that a young man had been tied to two cars and ripped in half after complaining that Gaddafi had had sex with his wife. 
 
 But there were other claims we could check. 
 
 One was that on 22 December 1992, almost four years to the day after Pan Am 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, a Libyan Arab Airlines 727 was shot down on Gaddafi's orders. 
 
 A total of 157 people - Libyans and foreigners - had died. 
 
 Its flight number, curiously, was 1103. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The wreckage of Flight 1103 on the outskirts of Tripoli 
 
 After Gaddafi fell, the British wife of one of the victims tried to get the new Libyan government to open an enquiry. 
 
 Reporters pieced together statements made by pilots of military jets in the area, air traffic controllers and airline employees. 
 
 But what was important about Mr Aujali's statement to us was that it was the first time a true insider had spoken out. 
 
 Was he sure? "100%," he said. 
 
 A bomb with a timer had been placed on board the plane. When it failed to detonate, Gaddafi ordered the plane to be knocked out of the sky, near Tripoli airport. 
 
 Find out more Image caption Ali Aujali switched sides in 2011, after representing Gaddafi for 40 years Watch Mad Dog: Gaddafi's Secret World on BBC Four at 22:00 GMT on Monday 3 February or catch it later on iPlayer. Mad Dog: Gaddafi's Secret World 
 
 Why? 
 
 Mr Aujali said his motive had been to show the West - via Libya's state-controlled media - how international sanctions imposed after Lockerbie were hurting ordinary Libyans. 
 
 Unable to buy spare parts, the story went, Libyan Arab Airlines could not fly its planes safely. The dead were victims of what Gaddafi liked to represent to visitors as Western terrorism. 
 
 The official explanation varied. Eventually the regime jailed the pilot of a Libyan Air Force MiG and his instructor, claiming they had collided with the plane. 
 
 The instructor, Majid Tayari, agreed to meet us in a Tripoli hotel. There was no collision, he insisted. He saw part of the tail of the 727 hurtling towards him. 
 
 Something hit the MiG from underneath, then fire broke out. Both pilots ejected. According to him the 727 had been hit first. 
 
 Pieces of fuselage rained down at very high speed and punctured the skin of the MiG. 
 
 Libyan Arab Airlines' air safety manager in 1992, Mahmud Tekalli, also disputes that a mid-air collision was the cause. He believes flight 1103 was deliberately destroyed. 
 
 Image caption Frank Terpil ran a murder-for-hire business for Gaddafi until his cover was blown 30 years ago 
 
 We went to the crash site and then negotiated our way past the militia guarding Tripoli airport. 
 
 A back road runs past elderly planes. 
 
 Off the road we found the wreckage of Flight 1103 in eerily good condition, protected by the desert climate, ready to lay bare its secrets to crash investigators. 
 
 Mr Aujali was not the only insider we met on our travels. 
 
 On a private island in the Pacific Ocean, we talked to Lutz Kayser, a German rocket designer who worked for Gaddafi in the 1980s. 
 
 Mr Kayser says: "He was a very nice, modest person and I had the impression he was hiding his weakness behind a facade." 
 
 Mr Kayser's wife, Susanne, says Gaddafi was "charming and could charm the birds out of the trees" but she said he later became disillusioned when he failed to set up a "utopia" in Libya. 
 
 In Havana we interviewed Frank Terpil, an American fugitive from justice who ran a "Murder Incorporated" operation for Gaddafi in the 1970s, killing Libyan dissidents abroad. 
 
 Mr Terpil said: "Gaddafi thought that anybody who was a dissident was going to be eliminated. He had contracts out on a bunch of people in London." 
 
 Image caption Urs Tinner, who was tracked down to Switzerland, said he feared for his life 
 
 And after pursuing him for months, we finally reached Urs Tinner, a Swiss engineer who worked for Abdul Qadeer Khan, once called the most dangerous man in the world. 
 
 Mr Khan developed nuclear weapons for Pakistan and later offered nuclear technology to any country with the money to pay. Gaddafi was his most lucrative client. 
 
 Mr Tinner says he was not aware Mr Khan was a "nuclear proliferator" but when he realised he tipped off the CIA, who intercepted a ship with final parts for a centrifuge. 
 
 We also unearthed evidence of Gaddafi's sexual abuse of young girls. 
 
 And one of his female bodyguards, who now lives in hiding, told us she ended up fearing him: "[One night] we were going to witness the execution of 17 students. They did not hang them. They shot them. We were forbidden to scream. We were ordered to cheer." 
 
 Finally we found Gary Peters, an Australian bodyguard for the Gaddafi family, who had fled to Niger with the ex-leader's son Saadi, while Gaddafi made his last stand in Sirte. He said: "He stood to the last because he thought he could possibly reclaim his status." 
 
 Watch Mad Dog: Gaddafi's Secret World on BBC Four on Monday 3 February at 22:00 GMT or catch it later on catch it later on the BBC iPlayer.
– The destruction of Syria's chemical weapons continues to hit delays—but a secret effort to rid Libya of chemical weapons has been a success, the New York Times reports. The US and Libya have been destroying what was left of Moammar Gadhafi's stockpile, including hundreds of weapons containing a mustard agent. The three-month project, which wiped out two tons of arms using what the Times calls a "giant, high-tech oven," ended last week. "It’s a big breakthrough," says an expert, noting that the process—a basis for the much larger effort in Syria—"was very difficult because of weather, geography, and because it's a dangerous area with warring tribes, increasing the risks of theft and diversion." In 2004, Gadhafi had provided some 24.7 metric tons of chemical weapons to the West for destruction, but only half were gone by the time civil war began in 2011. The post-Gadhafi Libyan government sought to rid itself of the remainder, as well as almost two tons of additional material it had found—agents already installed in bombs and artillery, the Times notes. The destruction effort, which used funds from the Pentagon as well as Canada, saw the weapons vaporized in an oven created by Swedish firm Dynasafe. Meanwhile, the BBC is airing old Gadhafi secrets in a special tonight; among them, a former ally who says the strongman ordered a plane shot down near Tripoli in 1992, killing 157 passengers in a demonstration against sanctions.