ISLAMABAD, 19 January 2004 — Pakistan has expanded its investigation of the country’s premier nuclear weapons laboratory, detaining as many as seven scientists and administrators for questioning, amid allegations that sensitive technology may have spread to countries such as Iran, North Korea and Libya, officials said yesterday.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said that over the past two or three days between five and seven personnel at the Khan Research Laboratories had been taken in for “debriefing.”
Among them was Islamul Haq, a director at the laboratory. Two uniformed men believed to be intelligence agents picked him up as he was dining on Saturday at the residence of the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The laboratory is named after Khan, a national hero for leading Pakistan to its underground test of the Islamic world’s first nuclear bomb in 1998, designed as a deterrent to its larger rival India. Haq is Khan’s principal staff officer.
“We have had no contact with him,” Haq’s wife, Nilofar Islam, told The Associated Press. “We don’t know where he is and what he is being asked.” She was informed of Haq’s detention by Khan.
Though all the men remained in custody, Ahmed played down the detentions, saying the personnel being debriefed were not “necessarily involved in something or have allegations against them,” he said.
In the past two months, Pakistan has interrogated a handful of scientists at the laboratory, after receiving unspecified documents from the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency about Iran’s nuclear program, officials say.
Among those who have been questioned is Khan, although he has not been detained and is still treated as an official dignitary in Pakistan.
Pakistan has strongly denied any official involvement in possible proliferation to Iran, Libya and North Korea, but has acknowledged that individual scientists acting on their own account may have transgressed that rule.
In his first-ever speech to Parliament on Saturday, Pakistan’s military ruler, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, noted that the world suspects Pakistan of being a nuclear proliferator and that the country must show that it is a responsible power.
The Jan. 2 arrest of a businessman at Denver airport in the United States, accused of smuggling nuclear bomb triggers to Pakistan, has deepened suspicions of Pakistani involvement in the nuclear black market. Asher Karni, who heads a South African company, is accused of being the middleman for a Pakistani company’s purchase of dozens of triggered spark gaps — electronic devices that can be used to trigger nuclear weapons — allegedly using an elaborate scheme to try to get around US export restrictions to Pakistan.
The proliferation allegations are an embarrassment to Washington, which calls Pakistan a key ally in the war on terrorism.
