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1998 Murder in Pakistan May Be Linked to Nuclear Transfers
The 1998 murder of the wife of a North Korean official in Pakistan may tie Pakistani military officials to the black-market nuclear transfers conducted by top Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Los Angeles Times reported today (see GSN, Dec. 31, 2002). In 1998, Kim Sa Nae was shot to death near Khan’s home in the city of Rawalpindi. Kim was the wife of a midlevel North Korean diplomat who has been identified by the United States as one of North Korea’s key arms dealers during the 1990s, according to the Times. Current and former staff members at the Khan Research Laboratories, Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons facility, said that Kim was part of a North Korean delegation that Khan had invited to witness Pakistan’s first underground nuclear test in May 1998. Pakistani intelligence agents had suspected that Kim was a “mole” inside the delegation for the United States or another western country, and her activities were later discovered by Pakistani and North Korean intelligence, the Times reported. Three days after Kim was killed, her body was taken out of Pakistan on a chartered Pakistani C-130 military transport plane — the same one Khan has confessed to using in his nuclear transfers, a source said. In addition to Kim’s body, the plane also carried P-1 and P-2 uranium enrichment centrifuges, technical information and depleted uranium hexaflouride gas back to North Korea, the source said. According to an Indian official, the flight was operated by Shaheen Air International, one of several corporations operated by the Pakistani military. The company’s current chairman is Air Chief Marshal Kaleem Saadat, and six of its seven directors are former Pakistani air force officers (Watson/Zaidi, Los Angeles Times, March 1).
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