Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan on Thursday rejected a New York Times' report that Dr AQ Khan had provided nuclear weapons' design to Iran and said that it was the writer's own 'creative insertions'. "The writer of the report has spun a strange web, based on flimsy evidence, hearsay, and snippets of conversations. The CIA report does not mention any designs for weapons or bomb making components," said the spokesman while commenting on the report.
The spokesman said that the excerpt of the CIA report, as quoted by the New York Times stated that "The AQ Khan network provided Iran with designs for Pakistan's older centrifuges as well as designs for more advanced and efficient models and components". Unrelated statements attributed to unnamed officials or to former CIA director George Tenet did not make up for the writer's unsubstantiated claims about the weapon's design supply to Iran, he added. The spokesman recalled that in the past year, Pakistan had conducted an inquiry to unearth an illicit network of international blackmarketeers, dismantled it, and had shared the results of the inquiry transparently with the Pakistani people. He said Pakistan had been cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the international community to thwart international blackmarketeers from proliferating sensitive nuclear technology. |