Khan Hopes for Release From House Arrest

Former top Pakistani nuclear scientist and proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan said Monday that he hopes to be released following more than four years of confinement, Reuters reported (see GSN, March 10).

Supporters are pressing the incoming coalition administration to release Khan, who was placed under house arrest in early 2004 after admitting to providing nuclear knowledge and technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

The idea that he was confined for his own safety “is nothing but a lame excuse,” he told Nawa-i-Waqt.  “It is simply irrational.  I was roaming around the world freely at times when in 1979 numerous fake cases had been registered against me in Holland and I faced no security threat.”

Khan, who turned 72 on Monday, is believed to have illegally obtained blueprints for uranium enrichment centrifuges from the Dutch branch of Urenco, the Dutch-British-German consortium where he worked the 1970s (see GSN, June 9, 2005). 

A Dutch court found him guilty of nuclear espionage in 1983 and imposed a four-year prison sentence, but a technicality later forced a reversal of the ruling.

There is little chance that Khan would be released in the near future, a source told Reuters.  There has been no serious discussion of the issue in policy circles, the source added (Augustine Anthony, Reuters, April 2).

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