Worries deepen over nuclear ring 'Khan was selling a complete package' 1R Edition

• Published in: International herald tribune
• Main Author: William J. Broad and David E. Sanger
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Paris New York Times Company 22.03.2005
• Edition: International edition
• Subjects: Khan, Abdul Qadeer
• ISSN: 0294-8052

Iran was a customer of the [Abdul Qadeer Khan] network, and while it appears to have turned down the offer of the engineering secrets in 1987, some intelligence officials are concerned that it picked up the technology elsewhere. North Korea, which is believed to have two separate bomb projects under way, also did business with the Khan network, although precisely what it obtained is not clear. The United States has not been allowed to interview Khan, and [Condoleezza Rice] raised concerns about cooperation in the nuclear investigation when she met with [Pervez Musharraf] last week. But American officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency are beginning to extract information from Khan's chief deputy, Buhary Ayed Abu Tahir, who is in jail in Malaysia. "It's becoming clearer to us that Khan was selling a complete package," said a senior American official involved in the setting of nuclear strategy. The first public hint that Khan's network traded in bomb designs and engineering instruction emerged in 1995, after UN inspectors in Iraq found a set of documents describing an offer made to Baghdad before the Gulf war of 1991. An internal Iraqi memorandum, dated June 10, 1990, told of an unidentified middleman who said that Khan could help Iraq "establish a project to enrich uranium and manufacture a nuclear weapon" and was "prepared to give us project designs for a nuclear bomb."