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U.S. Response III: Bush Freezes Pakistani Groups’ Assets The United States yesterday asked its allies around the world to freeze the assets of two Pakistani groups, including a charity believed to have been used to help suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden obtain nuclear weapons, according to the New York Times. One of the groups, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, is run by two former Pakistani nuclear scientists who may have visited bin Laden earlier this year, the Times reported (see GSN, Dec. 12). “It was the UTN that provided information about nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda,” said U.S. President George W. Bush. The scientists, Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, were detained and questioned in Pakistan, but investigators and the CIA determined they did not know enough about nuclear weapons to assist bin Laden. UTN leader Mehmood, former director of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, left the commission “after criticizing the government of Pakistan’s movement toward signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,” the Bush administration said in a fact sheet released yesterday. Officials believe that UTN members met with bin Laden as well as other al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders to discuss development of weapons of mass destruction, according to a U.S. White House release (Sanger/Eichenwald, New York Times, Dec. 21). A search of the UTN offices in Kabul, abandoned during the U.S. bombing, revealed large amounts of important data on nuclear weapons, including computer hard drives and notebooks, U.S. officials said. The information found had far more detail than what was available on public sites on the Internet, they added (MSNBC.com, Dec. 21). International Response Senior Pakistani officials said Bush’s statement was tantamount to accusing Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf of lying in his statements that the UTN was involved only in relief work and had nothing to do with nuclear weapons, the New York Times reported. “At the very least, you’d have to say it’s a huge embarrassment to Musharraf,” a Western diplomat said. Diplomats said they were surprised that the dispute over the two nuclear scientists had led to such a public split between the United States and Pakistan. In his order last week to release the detained scientists, Musharraf might have decided to send a signal that Pakistan was drawing “a line in the stand,” and would not be ordered around when it came to nuclear weapons issues, diplomats said (John Burns, New York Times, Dec. 21).
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