ISLAMABAD, 30 May 2005 — Pakistan yesterday denied President Pervez Musharraf had said Iran wanted nuclear weapons. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement came after Tehran demanded Musharraf clarify his remarks to the German magazine Der Spiegel which quoted the president as saying in an interview that Iran was “very anxious to have the bomb”.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Jalil Abbas Jilani said Musharraf’s comments were incorrectly reported. “The president was asked whether or not Iran was anxious to develop a nuclear bomb. The president said ‘I don’t know,”’ Jilani said.
“With this explanation the misunderstanding that has developed as a result of misreporting of the president’s remarks should be removed,” he said.
Earlier, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters that it was unlikely that Musharraf made the comment during the interview that appeared in Saturday’s edition of Der Spiegel but called for an explanation from Islamabad.
Asefi insisted that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons and said it was not Pakistan’s business to make such comments.
In the interview, Musharraf was asked how Iran could be dissuaded from trying to make a nuclear weapon. He was quoted as responding: “I don’t know. They are very anxious to have the bomb.”
The news weekly also quoted Musharraf as saying a pre-emptive attack by the United States against Iran would be “a disaster.”
On Thursday, Pakistan confirmed that it had sent some parts of an old centrifuge to the UN’s atomic agency to help it establish whether Iran had been secretly developing nuclear weapons.
