UN: Pak scuttled probe on nuclear knowhow to Iraq

Pakistan had deflected and frustrated a UN probe of an offer to Iraq of nuclear know-how allegedly made in the 1990s on behalf of Dr. Abdul ...

Pakistan had deflected and frustrated a UN probe of an offer to Iraq of nuclear know-how allegedly made in the 1990s on behalf of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, former UN weapons inspectors today said. The offer is contained in Iraqi secret service documents.

With help from Bush administration which does not want attention focused on it, Pakistan was also able to play down the nuclear know-how it had actually provided to N Korea in return for the Ghauri missile and know-how to build medium range missiles in Pakistan itself, the Washington Times reported.

A middleman claiming to represent Khan ‘‘offered Iraq help in building an atomic bomb on the eve of the Gulf war, according to UN documents, diplomats and former weapons inspectors,’’ the daily said. Former inspectors, who spoke to the paper, said Pakistani officials did not cooperate when the UN tried to investigate if the scientist was behind the proposal.

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The former inspectors stopped short of saying that Pakistan was involved in the offer to help Iran build a nuclear weapon. The revelation follows recent news reports that Pakistan assisted N Korea’s nuclear programme in return for missiles and missile technology.

Pakistan has denied any link to Pyongyang or Baghdad. US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca last week said President Musharraf has given his assurance that nothing is being given to N Korea. UN officials told the daily that Iraq did not accept the offer from Pakistan and did not mention it in its latest arms declaration.

UN inspectors discovered the Pakistani offer in 1995 in more than one million Iraqi intelligence documents they found at an Iraqi storage facility. Among the documents is a letter dated October 6, 1990 — two months after Iraq invaded Kuwait — in which Iraq’s secret service wrote to Iraq’s Nuclear Weapons Department about the proposal from Dr. Khan, on helping Iraq establish a project to enrich uranium.

Pakistan, however, claimed it had probed on its own and determined that the letter was a fraud by an individual with no connection to the government. (PTI)