KEY POINTS:
Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, founder of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, is bristling with indignation.
After four years of enforced silence, the scientist described by the CIA as "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden" and on a Time cover as the "merchant of menace" is finally getting a chance to fight back.
Now aged 72 and suffering from prostate cancer, Khan wants to set the record straight. The allegations are "bullshit and concoctions," he said from his villa in one of Islamabad's leafiest suburbs, where he remains under house arrest. "I have become the black sheep."
Khan spearheaded Pakistan's clandestine nuclear programme from its inception in the mid-1970s until he was forced to make a humiliating confession about his activities on national TV in 2004 under huge pressure from Washington.
He said the confession had been made "in the national interest" but denied its contents were true. Mysteriously, he said others "got away scot-free" as a result of him taking all the blame.
Khan stands accused of helping Iran, Libya and North Korea to establish secret nuclear weapons programmes, a legacy the world is still struggling to deal with today in the case of Iran and North Korea.
He admitted helping Libya and Iran but insisted his aid was limited to pointing them in the direction of suppliers. He flatly denied providing any assistance to North Korea.
Khan said he used companies he knew from his days in the nuclear industry in Europe as suppliers when he shifted back to Pakistan. The businesses, based in Europe's most advanced economies including Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Holland, provided the Pakistani programme with all it needed, he said.
This was done openly in the 1970s; later the trade went underground, partly funnelled through subsidiaries of European companies operating from apartheid-era South Africa.
"When Iran and Libya wanted to do their programme, they asked our advice. We said, 'okay, these are the suppliers, who provide all.' This was very small advice," said Khan.
"I advised them. What's wrong with it? I became the 'ringleader' of the network. But the suppliers were there already for 20 years."
Khan said he had been to North Korea twice and insisted the reclusive communist state did not need any help from Pakistan, which has a nuclear programme based on uranium enrichment rather than the alternative plutonium technology.
In the past couple of weeks, the conditions of Khan's detention have been relaxed, and some members of the new coalition Government have even called for him to be freed.
- INDEPENDENT
