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.
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