KARACHI, 10 September 2006 — The father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, yesterday underwent “successful” surgery for prostate cancer at Agha Khan Hospital here, sources said.

A team of doctors led Dr. Farhat Abbas carried out the three-and-a-half hour operation. “The operation is successful and Qadeer Khan is responding well,” Dr. Abbas said.

Qadeer, 70, was admitted late Thursday to the hospital in Karachi, and the operation was performed yesterday.

Strict security was in place at the private hospital. Visitors were not allowed to see the scientist.

According to the security control room at the hospital, “No one at all” was allowed to visit Qadeer — not army personnel, not the regular hospital security, “especially not the press,” they added, claiming that “even Qadeer’s close family members are being put through excessive scrutiny before being allowed in to see the ailing scientist.

The government last month announced Qadeer was suffering from prostate cancer but said the disease was not at an advanced stage.

Qadeer has been living under virtual house arrest since February 2004, when he admitted in a televised speech to leaking nuclear technology to other countries without telling the government. He then apologized to the nation.

He was fired as a government adviser following a probe launched in 2003, after the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Khan was operating a black market in nuclear weapons technology. President Pervez Musharraf has pardoned Qadeer, but the scientist remains closely guarded and largely confined to his home in Islamabad.

Government officials have said this is for Qadeer’s own security.

The government says it has shared results of its probe with the UN nuclear watchdog and other countries, but has refused to allow foreign officials to interrogate Qadeer.

The government’s Aug. 22 announcement that Qadeer was suffering from prostate cancer shocked a nation, which regards him as a hero for providing a nuclear deterrent against neighboring archrival India, and for making Pakistan the world’s only known nuclear-armed Islamic nation.

Pakistan conducted its first nuclear tests in May 1998, weeks after tests by India, which had detonated its first nuclear explosion in 1974.