Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan yesterday denied selling blueprints for a nuclear weapon to Iran or North Korea, saying Western countries were to blame.
Khan’s comments came a day after a former arms inspector said in a report that the US and the UN atomic watchdog must be allowed to question Khan to learn if he sold the plans.
“This is all a lie, there is no truth in this,” Khan said by telephone from his Islamabad villa, where he has been kept under house arrest since confessing to proliferation activities in 2004.
“The Western countries are suppliers of the technology, they sold it, they are the proliferators ... Why don’t they publish juicy stories about Israel?” he said.
Former UN arms inspector David Albright said on Monday, after details of his draft report appeared in US newspapers, that there was a danger that Khan might be released without having to answer questions about the sensitive blueprints.
The plans show how to build a warhead compact enough to fit on a ballistic missile.
Khan was pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in 2004 after making a televised statement admitting to passing nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, but has not been allowed out in public.
After Musharraf’s allies lost general elections in February, Khan retracted the confession and said that it was forced.
The new government has recently relaxed restrictions on Khan, including allowing him to meet friends at a scientific institute and take phone calls.
“The statement is just aimed at putting pressure on [the] Pakistan government. The story came when there were talks about removing restrictions on me,” Khan said.
“We never prepared [such blueprints], we are not the designer, we are not the proliferator,” he said.
But Albright said that files found on computers by Swiss authorities prosecuting three members of Khan’s network contained information about the compact nuclear warheads.
“It looks like Khan did steal them [blueprints] and try to peddle them,” he said.
Albright said the blueprints discovered in 2006 are far more troubling than Khan’s earlier admissions because they offered instructions for building a coveted compact device.
Such information would be extremely valuable for countries with nuclear ambitions such as Iran or North Korea, providing a shortcut to making smaller atomic weapons, Albright said.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS