Free Republic

There is nothing much unusual about armed guards outside the houses in my quiet, neat neighbourhood of Islamabad. These are the homes of retired generals, well-connected politicians and international aid workers, all of whom might be targets for Pakistani extremists. But one house stands out. Instead of frail, elderly guards armed with shotguns, one house is ringed by uniformed police officers with AK-47s. Roadblocks control traffic, floodlights illuminate an area of scrub that has been cleared of trees and machine gun positions have been dug in all around. This is the home of AQ Khan, the metallurgist who did more...

ISLAMABAD: SNIPPET: "‘But we worry about proliferation and we have good reason to worry about proliferation,’ she said, alluding to Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. The United States has warned that the scientist, who was effectively put under a five-year house arrest after he admitted leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is still a proliferation risk. ‘We want to encourage Pakistan to join with us in the non-proliferation review conference that will be held next spring,’ Clinton told reporters travelling with her. ‘We want them to work with us on the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. We want them...

PAKISTAN SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON: The United States warned Tuesday that reputed Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has regained freedom of movement in Pakistan, still risks spreading his nuclear weapons know-how. It stopped short of criticizing its ally in the war on terror but recalled that Washington has long raised with Islamabad its fears about Khan, who five years ago admitted leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya." SNIPPET: "David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and nuclear specialist, told AFP that ‘it is a mistake’ to remove restrictions on a man who cannot be ‘trusted.’He said there is...

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ISLAMABAD – Pakistan sought to allay U.S. concern about the freedom of notorious nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, insisting Saturday that his network which allegedly supplied Iran and North Korea with atomic technology has been probed and dismantled and cannot rise again. Khan, feted in Pakistan for his key role in making it a nuclear weapons state, emerged from five years of de facto house arrest on Friday after a court declared him a "free citizen" subject to a secret agreement with the government.

Disgraced Pakistan A-bomb scientist declared free By MUNIR AHMAD – 1 hour agoISLAMABAD (AP) — The man who made Pakistan into a nuclear power and later took responsibility for leaking atomic secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya walked out of his home Friday after reaching a secret deal with the government that ended years of de facto house arrest.The decision to grant freedom of movement to Abdul Qadeer Khan stirred alarm in Washington, which worries that Iran has continued to pursue nuclear arms and that Pakistan may not be able to safeguard its own arsenal in the face...

Pakistan's disgraced nuclear scientist AQ Khan, who has been accused of running a proliferation network, Friday walked out a free man after the Islamabad High Court ended his house arrest. "These things happen. We should forget and look forward," Khan said after being declared a free man by the court. Khan told reporters that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif had also been "inside". "The government had made arrangements and nobody could hurt me. Now also, the government will take care," Khan said. Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Aslam, while announcing a verdict on several petitions...

Barely a month before the 9/11 terror attacks, two Pakistani nuclear scientists, said to be close to disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, met up with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and offered to supply him with atomic weapons, according to a newly released book Chaudiri Abdul Majeed and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who held a series of senior posts in Pakistani nuke programme, went to Taliban headquarters in Kandahar in mid-August 2001 and spent three days with bin Laden who was keen on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the book says. In fact, Mahmood was said to be more close to Khan,...

Pakistan’s Dr Nuke bids for the presidency The ‘rogue scientist’ blamed for selling bomb secrets has strong popular support, writes his confidant Simon Henderson After the resignation of Pervez Musharraf, who will be the next president of Pakistan? A controversial politician such as Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, or a nonpolitical figure? If the latter, it might, just might, be the detained nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. Last week a group of lawyers in the Pakistani city of Lahore marched in support of Khan’s candidacy. His actual election, requiring a majority vote in the national assembly, would shock...

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's foreign ministry insisted on Saturday that its nuclear proliferation case was closed, a day after the disgraced architect of its atomic program claimed the army under President Pervez Musharraf helped spread the technology. Abdul Qadeer Khan said on Friday that Pakistan's army supervised a 2000 shipment of used P-1 centrifuges to North Korea. It must have been sent with the approval of Musharraf, the then-army chief who took power in a 1999 coup, Khan alleged. "It was a North Korean plane, and the army had complete knowledge about it and the equipment," Khan said. "It must have gone...

Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has been living in official disgrace for more than four years, confined to his estate in Islamabad after confessing that he sold nuclear technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea. But his image as a national hero remains intact for most of his countrymen, who still regard him as the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the man who brought pride to a downtrodden country. Since the new coalition government took the reins in Pakistan this spring, momentum has been building to free Khan from house arrest and restore him to his former glory. As...

Imagine clicking and downloading your own nuclear-bomb blueprints. That, it seems, is what the nuclear-technology-smuggling ring led by renegade Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan allowed its customers to do, for the right price. A former top UN nuclear-weapons expert revealed Sunday that laptops captured from the Khan ring contained a step-by-step blueprint for building a modern nuke. Bottom line: In the digital age, the know-how to become a nuclear power is only a mouse click away for a rogue nation like Iran. The story reads like a Ted Bell thriller. The ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003 prompted Libya's Moammar...

WMDs: Blueprints for a nuclear weapon compatible with the ballistic missiles of Iran, North Korea and other rogue states were found on computers of the notorious Khan smuggling ring. Will a complacent world wake up?It's clear that it's getting easier to build and use a nuclear bomb. If civilized countries want to stop their biggest cities from becoming radioactive craters, they'd better implement a no-tolerance policy against nuclear proliferation. It's unacceptable to find — four years after their seizure — that computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities housed sophisticated electronic designs for a Pakistani atomic bomb, in a...

WASHINGTON: Four years after Abdul Qadeer Khan, the leader of the world's largest atomic black market, was put under house arrest and his operation declared over, international inspectors and Western officials are confronting a new mystery left by him, this time over who may have received blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon found on his network's computers. Working in secret for two years, investigators have tracked the digitized blueprints to Khan computers in Switzerland, Dubai, Malaysia and Thailand. The blueprints are electronic and rapidly reproducible for creating a weapon that is relatively small and easy to hide, making...

(AP / WASHINGTON) — An international smuggling ring may have secretly shared blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon with Iran, North Korea and other rogue countries, The Washington Post reported Sunday The smuggling ring was led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

An international smuggling ring may have secretly shared blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon with Iran, North Korea and other rogue countries, The Washington Post reported Sunday. The now-defunct ring led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan is previously known to have sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea. A draft report by former top United Nations arms inspector David Albright says the smugglers also acquired designs for building a more sophisticated compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and other developing countries, according to the Post...

WASHINGTON — American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling... --snip-- It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The garden is in full bloom at Abdul Qadeer Khan's house. A lazy summer haze has settled over his manse, and at the small police substation across the way, several men chitchatted amiably on a recent day, barely glancing at the upscale villa that for the past four years has been part prison, part palatial refuge for the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Until very recently, Khan has been virtually cut off from the world -- banished to house arrest by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf after admitting in a national television broadcast in 2004 to selling nuclear...

AQ Khan recants nuclear admission WASHINGTON: Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan told the US media on Tuesday that he was not responsible for passing nuclear secrets to Iran and Libya, back-pedalling from his earlier admissions. In an interview with the McClatchy news organisation, Khan said he had introduced Tripoli and Tehran to Western businesses that provided information on building a nuclear weapons programme. Khan had confessed in February 2004 that he had run a network that passed atomic secrets, equipment and technological advice to Iran, North Korea and Libya over a period of 15 years, a statement he recanted...

The Pakistani scientist disgraced for selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya has been hospitalized after complaining of weakness, the military said Wednesday. Medics who checked on Abdul Qadeer Khan at his home Tuesday found that he was suffering from low blood pressure and fever, probably due to an infection, a military statement said. He was subsequently admitted to a hospital for a detailed examination, it said. Doctors are hopeful that Khan will make a full recovery and return home in a couple of days.