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Nation loves me, says Dr A Q Khan
Islamabad—Nuclear Scientist Dr A Qadeer Khan had
said he had not leaked nuclear technology to any country adding he
had made confession on TV in the national interest.
He said this in an interview with media here Friday. He held all the
allegations leveled by the west on sale of nuclear technology are
fabricated.
“The nation loves me after Quaid-e-Azam. Nation knows it well who is
patriotic and who is not. What I have done I have done it in the
national interest”, he underscored.
When the outsiders hatch conspiracies then our own people also join
them, he alleged. Conspiracies have always been hatched against the
county, he added. “I am grateful to the nation that it remembers me.
Nation will soon come to know what has happened with me”, he
maintained
Pakistan had become invulnerable after it had gone nuclear, he said
adding he would not talk to the IAEA.
“I offer prayers five time and then take some rest and this way time
passes. I have got opportunity to read books after detention. I keep
on reading science books”, he maintained.
To a question Dr A Q Khan said he would spend future time with his
family members. “I will focus on educational and social projects I
had earlier started”, he added.
Country’s nuclear assets are in safe hands, he said adding Americans
would not refrain from unleashing propaganda campaign but they would
not succeed in achieving their objective.
Some lawyer has challenged my detention as I have read it in
newspaper. Every citizen has right to take action if some other
citizen is alleged, he held.
New government is elected government, he said. It will sure work for
the betterment of people, he added.—Online
NNI adds: Pakistan’s hero and father of the country’s nuclear
program, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan has said the confession had been
forced upon him by President Pervez Musharraf.
“It was not of my own free will. It was handed into my hand,” he
told the Guardian newspaper in Islamabad.
More worryingly, he swore never to cooperate with investigators from
the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite persistent fears
that nuclear technology traded by his accomplices could fall into
terrorist hands.
“Why should I talk to them?” he said. “I am under no obligation. We
are not a signatory to the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty]. I
have not violated international laws.”
He said details of his clandestine nuclear supply network were “my
internal affair and my country’s affair”.
Despite numerous requests from the IAEA and the US government,
Pakistan has refused access to Khan, who is still considered a
national hero. A spokesman at the UN watchdog’s headquarters in
Vienna declined to respond to his comments.
Until this week Khan had been unseen and largely unheard since his
February 2004 appearance on state television, in which he said he
had hawked the country’s nuclear know-how abroad. He offered his
“deepest regrets and unqualified apologies”. Since then Khan has
been confined to his villa below the Margalla Hills in Islamabad,
where he lives with his wife, Henny. He was initially subjected to
tight restrictions. Telephone calls were monitored, internet access
was forbidden and visitors were turned away by soldiers camped at
his gate. He was allowed to leave the house in August 2006 only for
a cancer operation in Karachi, which was successful.
But as Musharraf’s powers have ebbed over the past year, so have the
ties on Khan been loosened. First he was allowed to have lunch with
close friends, then last month he gave his first interview from his
house arrest to a local Urdu language newspaper. Now he hopes that
the newly elected prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, will set him
free.
“As long as you are living there is always hope,” he said, adding
that he would wait for pressing economic and political crises to
pass. In reality, he may be waiting for Musharraf to be forced out.
Yesterday the military dismissed speculation, prompted by changes in
the army command, that Musharraf was about to quit as president. “A
section of press is trying to sensationalise routine functional
matters,” said a spokesman.
Khan has emerged as Pakistan celebrates the 10th anniversary of the
1998 test that catapulted the volatile nation into the nuclear club.
Speaking by telephone, he displayed the mix of defiant nationalism
and religious ardour that has endeared him to many Pakistanis.
Reports that nuclear technology was smuggled abroad were “western
rubbish”, he said, and unfavourable accounts of his life were “shit
piles”. He brusquely dismissed nicknames such as “the Merchant of
Menace” from a Time magazine cover.
“It doesn’t bother me at all. They don’t like our God, they don’t
like our prophet, they don’t like our holy book, the Qur’an. So how
could they like me?” he said.
He dismissed reports that he owned 43 houses in Islamabad, had many
bank accounts and owned a $10m hotel in Timbuktu, Mali. “The
journalists should have gone and seen - it was an eight-room
mud-brick house where the poor people reside,” he said, referring to
the latter. Asked if he was rich he answered: “Never was, never will
be.”
Khan said yesterday that nuclear technology was freely available in
the west to Iran or North Korea. “They were supplying to us, they
were supplying to them ... [to] anyone who could pay,” he said.
But for all his defiant talk, one subject remains out of bounds for
Khan. Supporters claim he was made a scapegoat for Pakistani
generals involved in nuclear trading. Khan refuses to discuss the
issue. “I don’t want to talk about it. Those things are to forget
about,” he said.
He denied speculation he had hidden evidence of military collusion
with his daughter, Dina, who lives in London. “MI6 has spoken to my
daughter, they have been to her house. I did not keep any official
papers in my house or anywhere,” he said.
Khan directed Pakistan’s nuclear enrichment programme for 25 years.
Born in pre-partition India - his family moved to Pakistan after
1947 - his passion for developing a nuclear bomb was driven by
hatred of his country of birth.
Khan is worshipped as a hero at home, but the former CIA director
George Tenet described him as “at least as dangerous as Osama bin
Laden”, and fears of the damage wreaked by his smuggling network
were realised when North Korea exploded a nuclear device in October
2006.
In Musharraf’s 2006 memoir, he said he sacked Khan after learning
that he was “up to mischief”.
Khan blames this on the “self-seekers and sycophants” around
Musharraf, who had allowed Pakistan to become a “banana republic”.
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