A.Q. Khan will be released after elections, says Mushahid

Lahore, Feb. 4: Secretary General Syed Mushahid HussainPakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) Secretary General Syed Mushahid Hussain has said that incarcerated nuclear scientist and proliferator Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan would be released after the February 18 elections.

The BBC Urdu service quoted Hussain as saying that he had met the detained scientist and told him that his previous “status will be restored”.

Speaking in BBC Urdu’s programme Talking Point, Hussain said Khan had “sacrificed for the sake of Pakistan” to save the country’s nuclear assets.

Khan, is widely regarded as the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program.

In January 2004, Khan confessed to having been involved in a clandestine international network of nuclear weapons technology proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, Iran and North Korea. On February 5, 2004, President General Pervez Musharraf, announced that he had pardoned Dr. Khan as he was a national hero.

In an August 23, 2005 interview with Kyodo News, Musharraf confirmed that Khan had supplied gas centrifuges and gas centrifuge parts to North Korea and, possibly, an amount of uranium hexafluoride gas.

Khan came under scrutiny following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U. S. and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan to oust the fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It emerged that al-Qaeda had made repeated efforts to obtain nuclear weapons materials to build either a radiological bomb or a crude nuclear bomb. In late October 2001, the Pakistani government arrested three Pakistani nuclear scientists, all with close ties to Khan, for their suspected connections with the Taliban.

The Bush administration continued to investigate Pakistani nuclear weapons proliferation, ratcheting up the pressure on the Pakistani government in 2001 and 2002 and focusing on Khan's personal role. He has been under house arrest since February 2004. (ANI)

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