Sjeltur

Two Pakistani nuclear scientists met with Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and offered to supply him with nuclear weapons, shortly before the 9/11 terror attacks. According to investigative journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their new book The Man From Pakistan, Chaudiri Abdul Majeed and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood went to Taliban headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in mid-August 2001 and spent three days with bin Laden who was very interested in obtaining weapons of mass destruction.

It never came to a deal, Osama bin Laden and some of his senior associates abruptly left for the mountains of northwestern Afghanistan. According to Frantz and Collins, bin Laden told his followers before he left that “something great was going to happen, and muslims around the world were going to join them in the holy war”. Only weeks later 9/11 happened.

About a year earlier the two nuclear scientists had set up a non-profit organization, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, to carry out relief work in Afghanistan and this included advising the Taliban on scientific matters. Frantz and Collins write that several Pakistani army generals sympathetic to the Taliban were on the board of this organization, one of the few organizations that were allowed to operate in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Shortly after they opened their office in Kabul, the two scientists met with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden and their conversation quickly shifted from relief work to the development of nuclear weapons. After that, the scientists had more contacts with Al-Qaida associates, followed by their meeting with bin Laden in mid-August 2001.

After 9/11 the scientists were not able to contact Al-Qaida anymore, Pakistani leader Pervez Musharaff forced Mahmood to accept an early retirement as “he had expressed sympathies for the Taliban and other Islamic extremists”.

Mahmood was very close to A.Q. Khan, the ‘Father of the Islamic Bomb’. His work made Pakistan a nuclear power. Later it was revealed that Khan was the leader of an international ring proliferating nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Khan obtained a engineer’s degree in 1967 from the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, and a Ph.D. degree in metallurgical engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1972. Then he joined the staff of the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (FDO) in Amsterdam. This laboratory was a subcontractor for URENCO, the uranium enrichment facility at Almelo, The Netherlands. URENCO uses centrifuge technology to separate the fissionable isotope uranium-235 out of uranium hexafluoride gas. The technical details are regulated as secret information by export controls because they could be used for the purposes of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Khan had privileged access to the most restricted areas of the URENCO facility as well as to documentation on the gas centrifuge technology, he passed highly classified material to a network of Pakistani intelligence agents. In December 1975, Khan suddenly left The Netherlands. Back in Pakistan, Khan was put in charge of Pakistan’s uranium enrichment program. The knowledge acquired in The Netherlands by Khan eventually lead to the detonation of the first Pakistani nuclear bomb on May 28, 1998.

The former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said in August 2005 that the government of The Netherlands knew what Khan did, in the 1980s Khan entered The Netherlands again on two occasions, but according to Lubbers he was not arrested because the CIA, the American intelligence agency, wanted to track his movements. The last time Khan visited The Netherlands, the head of the Dutch intelligence agency actually picked him up from the airport, playing taxicab driver for Khan…