Press Trust of India Posted online: Sunday, April 03, 2005 at 1331 hours IST Updated: Sunday, April 03, 2005 at 1814 hours IST
New Delhi, April 3: Pakistani scientists Abdul Qadeer Khan and Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood had held meetings with Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, exchanged letters with militant organisations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and attended their gatherings and rallies, a media report said.
"When the CIA searched Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood's UTN (Umma Tameere-Nau) office in Kabul, they found large amounts of data on the construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons from the Kahuta laboratories. It also found letters exchanged between the UTN and islamist extremist organisations including Lashkar-e-Toiba", a report in Pakistani weekly said.
Mehmood, a close confidante of A.Q. Khan and a former Director of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, was arrested on October 23, 2001, at the headquarters of the UTN which he had set up for ‘humanitarian work in Afghanistan, it said.
Quoting the famed journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the article said Khan and Mehmood and other scientists of his organisation ‘attended Lashkar-e-Toiba gatherings’.
Khan also appeared in the rallies of the LeT headed by Hafeez Saeed. The militant outfit, which later changed its name to Jamaat al-Dawaa after being banned, "is alleged to have helped in equipping Al Qaeda with ‘dirty bombs’, the article said.
Mehmood, who was used to enrich uranium in Pakistan's Khushab plant, and Khan were also known to have held meetings with top Al Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden, the paper said.
The Friday Times said Mehmood "may have been a genius but he was crazy in his religious zeal" and had a firm belief that plutonium enrichment in Pakistan "should not be kept secret and should be passed around to islamic countries to challenge Israel and the West. He also had expert knowledge of the global nuclear black market".
After his arrest, Mehmood had denied he had ever met bin Laden. However, after months of questioning "he admitted to having met Osama, Al Zawhiri and other Al Qaeda members repeatedly, including on the day Al Qaeda struck in New York" (9/11).
The weekly said, "this time he (Mehmood) disclosed that he discussed the bombing of an American city with nuclear weapons. He told the CIA that Osama had obtained fissile material from the islamic movement of Uzbekistan of Tahir Yuldashev, recently said to be in hiding in South Waziristan. Mehmood said he had passed on information on nuclear technology to Osama, but had not discussed creating a Hiroshima-like nuclear blast in America".
When he was thereafter subjected to a lie detector test, he failed it", the weekly said.
