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Pakistani scientist offered
Saddam nuclear designs

A Pakistani scientist approached Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapon designs and offered help in procuring bomb components soon after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, a document found by United Nations weapons inspectors has revealed.

The revelation comes close on the heels of allegations that Islamabad helped North Korea develop a nuclear bomb and that Pakistani nuclear scientists met Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has denied the allegations.

The offer by the Pakistani scientist, found in Iraqi archives, was made in October 1990 as a US-led coalition prepared to repel the August invasion of Kuwait.

Iraq then had already embarked on a crash programme to develop a nuclear bomb, but told the UN it had not pursued the scientist's offer -- a claim UN investigators are inclined to believe, a report in The Times daily said on Friday.

Evidence of contact between the Pakistani scientist and Iraq will only fuel fears that Pakistan is willing to share its technology with so-called "rogue nations."

The document revealing the contact between the scientist and Iraq first came to the attention of UN weapons inspectors after the 1995 defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, General Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of Iraq's secret weapons programme.

After he defected to Jordan, Iraqi officials led UN inspectors to a cache of 1.5 million pages of documents hidden in packing crates at General Kamel's chicken farm in Iraq, the Haider House Farm.

Among them was a file of correspondence between Iraq's Mukhabarat secret service and Department 3000 of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, a secret Iraqi nuclear programme that was codenamed Petro-Chemical 3.

"Included was a few pages relating to an approach made by a foreign national who offered assistance, for financial reward, in nuclear weapon design and in the procurement of material that may be required," Iraq's declaration says.

"The Iraqi team pointed out to the International Atomic Energy Agency Action Team that no external assistance was received by the former Iraqi nuclear programme, other than that already declared to the team and is documented."

A report in The Times daily stated that the document identified the scientist as a Pakistani. The handwritten paper seems to be a record of a meeting between him and an Iraqi contact.

"He made the unsolicited offer to a contact of the Mukhabarat procurement network and there was a communication between the Mukhabarat and Department 3000, where IAEC procurement was handled.

PTI

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