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| Of Pak’s missing N-men and the Myanmar-China link |
| 2004-02-16 |
| EFL Why then in January 2002 did the ISI whisk away two nuclear scientists Dr Sulaiman Asad and Dr Ali Mukhtar to Myanmar? Then CIA chief George Tenet had visited Islamabad that month to provide clinching proof that Dr Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood headed a thriving racket supplying nuclear knowhow to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda in 1999. The Tenet visit had led to Musharraf ordering the arrest of Dr Mehmood and Chaudhury Abdul Majid. The CIA chief supplied copies of bank statements of the two Pakistani nuclear establishment personalities, proving they were receiving funds from Al Qaeda’s front organisations. Under interrogation, the two admitted to having met bin Laden and discussing with him designs of nuclear and chemical weapons. Four other scientists, Azfar Hasan Zaidi, Kishwar Ali, Taha Hussain and Jabbar Khan, were subsequently booked. The revelations stunned the world community, reeling as it was then from the shock of 9/11. That was 2002. This is 2004. What happened in the interregnum? Have Bashiruddin Mehmood and his group been persecuted in a Pakistani court? No. Sure, they were put under "house arrest" for a while. Their bank accounts, presumably the known ones, were "frozen" on the UN Security Council’s recommendation which included their names in an old list of individuals and entities linked to Al-Qaeda. After that, they went back to their daily lives. Washington, grateful to Musharraf for allowing use of Pakistani bases (denied officially) and other logistics, let sleeping dogs lie. And where are those two - Asad and Mukhtar - who were sneaked out to Myanmar the moment the FBI team landed in Islamabad to interrogate the group? Well, New Delhi followed their fortunes for a while and applied pressure on Myanmaar to evict them. South Block sources reveal that by mid-2002 they had moved out, possibly to China. Very little is known about these two have answers to a lot of questions. In January 2003, the lid was blown off another controversy. Many nuclear scientists, most of them trained in China and attached to the country’s nuclear power plant - CHASNUPP - had emigrated without official permission. Some had simply vanished into thin air. A memo sent from CHASNUPP to higher authorities, leaked to the Karachi-based web newspaper South Asia Tribune, listed nine absconders. It only speculated where they could have gone, for the absconders had not left a forwarding address. The ramifications of this are scary. Here too, the blame leads to the Pakistani Government, for it is illegal under its law for technical persons attached to the nation’s nuclear establishment to leave country for greener pastures. The memo stated that the defections began in April 1997. Between February and October 2000, six more scientists had walked away into the fog. It is anybody’s guess if the phenomenon is still continuing. Off working freelance in Iran or somewhere? |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |