TRIVANDRUM, India, Dec 9 - A diary kept by a Maldivian woman charged with spying on India's space programme described a plot to kill Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom with a human bomb, a police officer said on Friday. T.V. Madhusoodanan, director-general of police in southern Kerala state, told Reuters the diary belonged to Mariam Rasheeda, who was arrested in mid October on suspicion she had bought space secrets with sex and money.

Another Maldivian woman, two Indian rocket scientists and two businessmen have also been arrested in the sex, money and secrets scandal,India's biggest spy case. Madhusoodanan said the plot described in Rasheeda's diary involved a
woman named Seetha in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. He said Rasheeda told police Seetha was to strap a bomb to her body and jump before a car carrying the Maldivian leader.Under interrogation, Rasheeda said she belonged to the National Security Force in the Maldives and was sent to India to enquire into the plot to kill Gayoom, which she said was hatched by presidential rival Illias Ibrahim.

"The government of Maldives has nothing to say about what is allegedly written in Mariam Rasheed's diary with regard to a plot to kill President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom," a Maldivian government spokesman in Male said. The spokesman denied that Rasheeda belonged to the National Security Force or was an intelligence officer.

The diary notes, written in the official Maldivian language of Dhivehi, were read to crime branch police by a sixth-grade Maldivian schoolboy, Ibrahim Izhan, who lives in Trivandrum. "The notes said that not only our president but also a minister would be assassinated," Izhan told Reuters. "I was frightened on reading it." The boy said a Maldivian minister was to be assassinated on the Maldives' independence day, November 11. "Simultaneously Seetha wearing a belt bomb would jump in front of the car carrying President Gayoom the same day," the boy said. Izhan said Rasheeda came to lunch at his parents' house in late October, then departed leaving two bags. "The last we heard was that she had been arrested," he said.

Indian authorities have said Rasheeda and a second Maldivian woman, Fauzia Hassan, were intelligence operatives for an unknown foreign country who obtained vital defence secrets from a scientist at the Indian Space
Research Organisation (ISRO), Nambi Narayanan. A magistrate in Trivandrum on Wednesday turned Rasheeda over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to be held under the Official Secrets Act.

Defence officials said the secrets pertained to highly confidential flight test data from India's experiments with rocket and satellite launches, as well as secret technology for submarine communication. The CBI has accused another ISRO rocket scientist, D. Sasikumaran, of illegally amassing $170,000 in the scandal, far beyond his regular income and a huge sum in India.

The CBI claims a representative of the Russian space agency
Glovkosmos, Chandrasekharan, helped Sasikumaran accumulate the wealth. Chandrasekharan, a Bangalore-based businessman, is the alleged kingpin of the network. ISRO chairman Kasturi Rangan told a news conference on Friday that the
space programme remained on track and scientists had even agreed to advance the next launch of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle by a month to August 1995.

"There is absolutely no problem whatsoever with ISRO," he said, denying reports of an imminent reshuffle in the organisation. Some experts have said the programme will be set back because at least 20 scientists are under investigation. -Rediff-