New York — Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf suspected for at least three years that his country's top nuclear scientist was transferring atomic technology to other countries and removed him as a head of a weapons lab because of those suspicions, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
Gen. Musharraf, in an interview with The New York Times, said he forced the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, to retire from the lab in March 2001. It was the first time the president cited the suspicions as the reason for Khan's ouster, the newspaper said.
“We nipped the proliferation in the bud, we stopped the proliferation,” Gen. Musharraf told the newspaper on Monday. “That is the important part.”
Mr. Khan was pardoned by Gen. Musharraf on Thursday after admitting that he spread nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya through an international black market. Gen. Musharraf told the Times that he couldn't act earlier on his suspicions because he didn't have enough evidence to make the politically sensitive arrest of Mr. Khan, a national hero because of his role in developing Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
“It was extremely sensitive,” he said. “One couldn't outright start investigating as if he's any common criminal.”
It was not until October that U.S. authorities provided Pakistan with specific evidence of wrongdoing by the scientist, he said.
He denied allegations that Pakistan provided nuclear technology to North Korea in exchange for ballistic missile technology and he said his government was still trying to determine exactly what technology was turned over to Pyongyang.
The president also seemed to retreat from his earlier position that he would shield Mr. Khan from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog agency of the United Nations. “We need to think about it,” he said.
