The Washington Post has new details in the deeply disturbing Islamic nuclear conspiracy story; the middleman in the conspiracy, a Sri Lankan businessman named Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, is talking about how the schemes were set up around the world: Insider Tells Of Nuclear Deals, Cash.

His name surfaced earlier this month after Malaysia came under increasing international scrutiny in connection with Khan’s alleged peddling of nuclear technology.

For a network that moved nuclear contraband among various continents, Tahir, a product of many worlds, was the ideal middleman. Born in India, he moved to Sri Lanka as a child and then to Dubai when his family opened a company, SMB Group, in that Persian Gulf emirate. Today, the firm, which he and his brother own, is involved in computers and information technology.

Tahir, however, had turned his attention to Malaysia, marrying the daughter of a former Malaysian diplomat in a society wedding in 1998 and gaining permanent residency there.

He also saw business opportunities. Though he had planned in 2001 to manufacture centrifuge components in Turkey with a Turkish associate, police said, Tahir changed his mind and suggested that the parts be produced by a politically connected Malaysian company, Scomi Precision Engineering.

That company, set up in December 2001, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Scomi Group Berhad, which is involved primarily in the oil and gas business. Its two main shareholders are Kamaluddin Abdullah, the son of Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and Kamaluddin’s former classmate, Shah Hakim Zain. The pair are controlling shareholders in two investment companies that hold the majority of stock in Scomi Group.

Another major shareholder in one of the investment companies until earlier this year was Tahir’s wife, Nazimah Syed Majid. After Malaysian authorities began investigating Scomi’s involvement with Khan’s nuclear network, company officials asked her to sell her shares to Kamaluddin and his business partner, a Scomi spokeswoman said.

In April 2002, Tahir recommended that the company bring in a 39-year-old Swiss consultant, Urs Friedrich Tinner, to help set up a new plant for Scomi Precision Engineering in the Shah Alam industrial area near Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. Tinner’s father, Friedrich Tinner, was a mechanical engineer who had done business with Khan since the 1980s and had helped supply centrifuge components for Libya, the report said.

The Washington Post also has a new registration system that is quite intrusive and requires an email address. Interestingly, however, if you search Google News for a WaPo story and click through from there, you skip the registration check. (In geek language, the checking code is skipped when the HTTP_REFERER variable shows the link was followed from a page at Google.) For example, here’s the story linked above through Google News: Google Search.