Pakistan Nuclear Hero Loses Advisor Job

The Pakistani government fired Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the nation’s atomic bomb, from his job as a top-level advisor Saturday amid mounting suspicion that he sold nuclear weapons technology to Iran and Libya.

The government did not say whether it was considering further action against Khan. He is idolized as a national hero for helping Pakistan become the Islamic world’s only nuclear-armed country.

Khan’s home was under military guard Saturday night, and family friends said the scientist was under house arrest.

According to press reports quoting anonymous intelligence sources, Khan, 69, is suspected of amassing a fortune worth millions of dollars in property and overseas bank accounts by selling nuclear weapons secrets on the black market. He has denied any wrongdoing.

President Pervez Musharraf has vowed to punish “with an iron hand” anyone who leaked nuclear weapons secrets to foreign governments. He is also facing growing opposition to his administration’s close alliance with the U.S. and risks a widespread backlash if he prosecutes someone as popular as Khan.

The interrogation of Khan and other nuclear scientists, which began more than two months ago, has sparked daily protests from numerous groups, including the mainstream secular opposition, Islamist political parties, and even the national lawyers association.

A brief government statement Saturday said only that Khan “has ceased to hold the office” of special advisor to the prime minister for the strategic program, a Cabinet-level position.

A man who answered the phone at Khan’s residence Saturday night said, “I cannot tell you anything, whether Dr. Khan is here or not.” A military spokesman said only that Khan’s security had been enhanced.

Before his dismissal Saturday, Khan’s family had said he was under “virtual house arrest” because he was allowed to work at his office at the prime minister’s secretariat but could not leave Islamabad, the capital.

The move Saturday came amid the “investigation into alleged acts of nuclear proliferation by a few individuals and to facilitate those investigations in a free and objective manner,” the government statement said.

The military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, is holding as many as six nuclear scientists and three retired military officers for questioning, lawyers and family members of the detainees said.

The army officers are two brigadiers, who were once responsible for security at Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons production facility, and a major from the army corps of engineers, said lawyer Tariq Khokhar, who represents the major’s family.

Relatives insisted that none of the men could have sold weapons technology without the knowledge and approval of high-ranking military officers because the armed forces’ intelligence services strictly monitored their movements.

“Big Brother was there all the time,” Khokhar said. He said the army was offering up the three former officers as scapegoats to protect top officers whose approval, he said, would have been required for any sale of nuclear technology.

If Pakistan was bartering weapons technology for missiles from North Korea, senior armed forces officers had to have been involved because military planes allegedly made the secret flights to North Korea, the lawyer added.

Shafiq-ur Rahman said his father, the retired major, served actively as an army officer until 1992, when he became the civilian director-general of maintenance, general services and construction for the weapons research labs at Kahuta, a position he held until 2001.

Staff members at the nuclear facility and their families were closely monitored, and his father drew a reprimand from Military Intelligence officers for allowing Ur-Rahman, then 23, to attend a party at the Burmese Embassy in 1988, the son said in an interview.”The entry was made in my father’s [security] dossier that his son was found participating in a diplomatic get-together and I could never go back,” Ur-Rahman said.

The ISI began detaining Pakistan’s nuclear scientists in December after United Nations inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency found evidence of Pakistani involvement in Iran’s nuclear program.

Libya, which admitted in December that it had a nascent nuclear weapons program, also said it had received Pakistani help. U.S. officials have said that satellite images showed Pakistani military aircraft in North Korea in 2002.

The Pakistani government said that no nuclear proliferation had occurred since February 2000, when Musharraf created the National Command Authority, a group of government leaders and military commanders that controlled the nation’s nuclear weapons.

Anyone who leaked nuclear secrets did so for personal profit and was not acting with government approval, Musharraf says.

Khan had been accused of stealing blueprints for aluminum centrifuges to produce weapons-grade uranium in the 1970s while working in the Netherlands at a uranium enrichment plant operated by Urenco, a Dutch-German-British consortium. In 1983, a Dutch court sentenced Khan in absentia to a four-year prison term, but an appeals court overturned the conviction.

Khan led Pakistan’s top-secret effort to build an atomic bomb at a facility later named after him: the Khan Research Laboratories at Kahuta, about 20 miles southeast of Islamabad.

Pakistan followed neighboring India with its first nuclear weapons tests in 1998. Both countries are also building and testing a series of short- and medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Khan was also an important player in Pakistan’s missile program.

In 2001, Musharraf removed Khan as head of the nuclear weapons production facility that still bears his name, and appointed him his personal advisor on science and technology. Khan’s closest aide, Mohammed Farooq, was demoted from his position as chief of overseas procurement.

Farooq, the first scientist detained by the ISI, has been in custody since Dec. 1. The detainees’ families are fighting in court for information on where and why the men are being held.

Government lawyers say they need more time to provide the answers. Before granting a sixth adjournment Friday], high court Justice Maulvi Anwar ul-Haq gave the government until Feb. 9 as a “last chance” to submit a written reply.

A government statement Saturday said the decision to dismiss Khan was made at a special session of the National Command Authority. Musharraf chairs the body, which includes Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, several Cabinet ministers and the country’s top military commanders.

Pakistan’s nuclear capability is solely to deter aggression, “and it would never be in the national interest to share this technology in whatever form, with any other country,” the government said in a statement on state-run television.

“Pakistan took its international obligations with the utmost seriousness.”