ISLAMABAD, 6 February 2004 — Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf yesterday pardoned the father of the country’s nuclear program after he confessed on television to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
President Musharraf told reporters that he had accepted the mercy petition of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan and pardoned him.
“Whatever I have done, I have tried to shield him,” Musharraf said of Khan. But he noted “one has to balance between international requirements and shielding.”
“You cannot shield a hero and damage the nation,” the president said at a combative and emotional news conference. He wore military camouflage fatigues.
Earlier, the Cabinet of Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali recommended that Khan be pardoned.
In a televised apology on Wednesday after meeting Musharraf, Khan accepted full responsibility for nuclear leaks he said were made without government approval or knowledge and asked for forgiveness.
“There’s a written appeal from his side and there’s a pardon written from my side,” Musharraf said. There had been no decision on six other suspects detained in the investigation, the president added. Five of them were formally arrested Wednesday, Interior Ministry spokesman Rauf Chaudhry said. “They include nuclear scientists and administrators belonging to the Khan Research Laboratories.”
Asked what he thought motivated the scientists who leaked technology, Musharraf said: “What is the motive of people? Money, obviously. That’s the reality.”
He said Pakistan would not submit to any UN supervision of its weapons program and that no documents would be handed over to the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. He also ruled out an independent investigation of the military’s role in proliferation.
However, he said the IAEA was welcome to come and discuss the proliferation issue with Pakistan. “We are open and we will tell them everything,” Musharraf said.
In Vienna, IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei said the revelations from Khan about a clandestine network for spreading nuclear technology were just the “tip of an iceberg” about such illegal trafficking.
Khan “was not working alone,” said El-Baradei, speaking on the sidelines of a conference on nuclear non-proliferation. “We need to follow this through. We need to know who was producing centrifuges” that can be used to make highly enriched uranium for atomic bombs.
“We have to make sure it will not be repeated,” El-Baradei said about the clandestine nuclear dealing.
He said Pakistan has been “quite cooperative so far” with the IAEA in trying to piece together what he called “a supermarket” of international smuggling of nuclear materials and information such as weapons blueprints the United States has found in Libya.
“We’re looking into who else got the materials, other than Libya or Iran,” El-Baradei said.
He said individuals in at least five countries were involved in trafficking that went back at least to the 1980’s. Khan “was an important part of the process. Now he’s cooperating with Pakistani authorities so hopefully we’ll get as much information as we need,” the UN official said.
During a speech at the Georgetown University in Washington D.C., CIA Director George Tenet said the secrets leaked by Khan were only exposed after US and British spies penetrated his proliferation network.
A trial of Khan could have uncovered embarrassing revelations about top government and military officials. There is widespread skepticism about claims that they did not authorize or know about proliferation of nuclear technology and hardware.
