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| India-Pakistan |
| Iran Crisis Puts Pressure On Khan Case To Reopen |
| 2006-04-18 |
| New York, 18 April (AKI/DAWN) - The case involving Pakistan's disgraced nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan could be reopened following claims by Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Tehran was "presently conducting research on the P-2 centrifuge, boasting that it would quadruple Iran’s enrichment powers". A report in the New York Times on Monday said: "Last year, Pakistan said its investigation into the Khan network was closed. But the Iranian crisis has led to renewed questioning of Dr. Khan, American intelligence officials and European diplomats say." Khan, considered the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, admitted in February 2004 that he had trafficked nuclear secrets and parts to other countries, including Iran, Libya and North Korea. He was pardoned by Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf on the condition that he would cooperate with the authorities. The Pakistani government confirmed in 2005 that Khan had supplied nuclear parts to Iran. However the nuclear scientist has not been allowed any visitors and international investigators into global nuclear proliferation have not been allowed to question him. The New York Times report on Monday said: “The new claim focuses renewed attention on Iran’s rocky relationship with Mr Khan, who provided it with much of the enrichment technology it is exploiting today. If Mr Ahmadinejad’s claim is correct, it probably indicates that relationship went on longer and far deeper than previously acknowledged. Mr Khan and his nuclear black market supplied Iran with blueprints for both the more elementary machine, known as P-1, and the more advanced P-2.” There were other indications that Khan might have been dealing with Iran as recently as six years ago, the newspaper said, noting that Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf disclosed recently that he fired Dr. Khan in 2001 after discovering that he was trying to arrange a secret flight to the Iranian city of Zahedan, known as a centre of smuggling. Khan refused to discuss the flight, saying it was important and very secret. “I said: ‘What the hell do you mean? You want to keep a secret from me?’” Musharraf recalled in an interview with The New York Times for a Discovery Times television documentary, Nuclear Jihad. “So these are the things which led me to very concrete suspicions,” Musharraf said, “and we removed him.” Officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) say solving the mystery of the P-2 shipments has become one of the most critical issues on which they need answers in the next two weeks, before IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei issues a report to the United Nations Security Council on April 28, the Times said. Other pressing questions include Iran’s reluctance to discuss a document found by inspectors — one that the Iranians were not willing to let the inspectors take out of the country — that sketches out how to shape uranium into perfect spheres, the tell-tale shape for a primitive weapon. Investigators say that the document, too, appears to have come from the Khan network. It is also unclear whether Khan sold the Iranians a complete Chinese-made bomb design similar to the one Libya turned over to the United States when it gave up its weapons programme. Questions about other copies of the bomb design have been met with silence, in Iran and in Pakistan, the newspaper said. “Frankly, I don’t know whether he has passed these bomb designs to others,” Musharraf said in the interview with Discovery Times channel. Even under a loose form of house arrest for the past two years, he said, Khan “sometimes has been hiding the facts”. European diplomats said a delegation of Iranian officials is due to arrive on Tuesday in Vienna, where the International Atomic Energy Agency will press them to address the new enrichment claim, as well as other questions about Iran’s programme, including designs for a crude bomb found in the country. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #3 I sense resistance. |
| Posted by: Sping Gling1984 2006-04-18 19:07 |
| #2 Khan't !! |
| Posted by: MacNails 2006-04-18 10:46 |
| #1 khan!!!! |
| Posted by: ShepUK 2006-04-18 10:44 |