Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, may have helped sub-Saharan African countries develop weapons in clandestine exchanges for the region’s uranium, it emerged on Monday.
Dr Khan visited Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan between 1998 and 2002 in the wake of selling nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya in a black-market trade exposed this year.
The disgraced scientist toured Africa with an entourage of aides and nuclear experts, indicating the network was wider than previously thought, according to an Associated Press investigation published on Monday.
Citing hotel records and witnesses, it said the group used a hotel in Timbuktu, Mali, as a desert base for four trips to the region.
Officials from the Bush administration said the United States was investigating whether Dr Khan had supplied others besides Iran, North Korea and Libya, the three countries he has so far admitted helping.
However, there was no proof that the sub-Saharan visits were to tout nuclear secrets. Analysts said the purpose may have been to obtain uranium for Pakistan’s atomic programme in return for helping the Africans with conventional technology such as ballistic missiles.
Feted at home as the metallurgist who enabled Pakistan to match its rival India’s nuclear bomb, Dr Khan horrified the rest of the world in February when news of his illegal deals broke.
Accused of overweening greed and ambition, the 69-year-old admitted his wrongdoing on television and was pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf after claiming Pakistan’s authorities knew nothing of the black market network. The investigation by AP cast fresh doubt on the regime’s innocence because it showed that Dr Khan and other ”Pakistan nuclear chiefs” signed the guest log of a hotel in Timbuktu on February 16 2002 — a year after Islamabad said it had ended the scientist’s nuclear trafficking.
”It’s up to a year after his removal and he’s still going with his entire top staff… to travel to Africa?” asked Gaurav Kampani of the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, based in California. ”What is he doing?”
Since Sudan, Mali, Nigeria and Niger possess known or suspected uranium deposits, one theory was that he was shopping for raw material to make fresh atom bombs, either for his homeland or for his foreign clients.
Analysts doubted the African countries had the expertise to enrich uranium and make their own nuclear weapon.
But in exchange for supplying Dr Khan, they may have been given tips on moving a step closer to that goal.
Alternatively, they may have garnered non-nuclear military hardware, said Shannon Kyle of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Nigeria, which harboured ambitions to build a bomb in the 1980s, said last month that Pakistan would help it obtain nuclear power, but the admission was swiftly retracted as a ”typographical error”.
The creaking governments of Mali, Chad and Niger are implausible nuclear wannabes. But Sudan is a hardline Islamic regime designated a terrorist sponsor by the US.
”Sudan strikes me as the most worrying of the lot,” said Susan Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration.
But Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, rubbished the notion that it had sought nuclear arms. ”We have never tried,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â