Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan met Osama Bin Laden

Pakistani nuclear scientists A Q Khan and Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood had held meetings with Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, exchanged letters with militant groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba and attended their gatherings and rallies, a media report said.

The Musharraf regime is today running with the American hare and hunting with the Jihadi Hound! And is reaping the benefits from the USA while passing the benefits to the Jihadis. While the USA has supplied Pakistan with F16s, the Jihadis are using Pakistani soil to base their training camps, hide along the border with Afghanistan in the FATA (Federally Administered Territories), collecting and siphoning funds for Jihadi operations. Remember the 9/11 funds were wired from Pakistan to Mohammed Atta.

We need to enlighten ourselves how Pakistan qualifies to be a Trojan Horse in the War on Terror This is how we see Pakistan’s role as a Trojan Horse: By being the first Muslim country to have an Atom bomb and making its proclivities about the Bomb clear by naming it with its religion - The Islamic Bomb. By proving itself to be the proliferator of Nuclear capability to other Muslim countries. By shielding AQ Khan after it has been proved that he not only met Osama Bin Laden, but has sold centrifuged to Iran and Libya, and perhaps also to Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Egypt.

“When the CIA searched (Sultan Bashiruddin) Mehmood’s UTN (Umma Tameere-Nau) office in Kabul, they found large amounts of data on the construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons from the Kahuta laboratories. It also found letters exchanged between the UTN and Islamist extremist organisations including Lashkar-e-Toiba,” a report in Pakistani weekly Friday Times said.

Mehmood, a close confidante of A Q Khan and a former director of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, was arrested on October 23, 2001, at the headquarters of the UTN which he had set up for “humanitarian work in Afghanistan”, it said. Quoting the famed journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the article said Khan and Mehmood and other scientists of his organisation “attended Lashkar-e-Toiba gatherings”.

Khan also appeared in the rallies of the LeT headed by Hafeez Saeed. The militant outfit, which later changed its name to Jamaat al-Dawaa after being banned, “is alleged to have helped in equipping al-Qaeda with ‘dirty’ bombs,” the article said.

Mehmood and Khan were also known to have held meetings with top Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, the paper said.

It said Mehmood “may have been a genius, but he was crazy in his religious zeal” and had a firm belief that plutonium enrichment in Pakistan “should not be kept secret and should be passed around to Islamic countries to challenge Israel and the West. He also had expert knowledge of the global nuclear black market”. After his arrest, Mehmood had denied he had ever met bin Laden. However, after months of questioning “he admitted to having met Osama, Al Zawhiri and other al-Qaeda members repeatedly, including on the day al-Qaeda struck in New York (9/11)”.

How Pakistan qualifies to be a Trojan Horse in the War on Terror

This is how:

By being the first Muslim country to have an Atom bomb and making its proclivities about the Bomb clear by naming it with its religion - The Islamic Bomb.

By proving itself to be the proliferator of Nuclear capability to other Muslim countries.

By being the country to give asylum to Al Qaeda's Osama Bin Laden - America's enemy number one.

Pakistan has been working against the interests of the USA since the end of the Cold war. Apart from building up the now deposed Taliban regime, it has provided Al Qaeda with its recruits from the thousands of Jihad preaching madaresahs in Pakistan.

With 9/11, this game was called off with the American ultimatum to Musharraf. With a reversal of policy, started Pakistan's double game of making a show of supporting the US War on Terror while trying to undermine it through proliferating nuclear capability to the enemies of the USA like Iran, North Korea and Libya. Its offer of nuclear technology to Saddam's Iraq is documented in the evidence found in Baghdad by American forces. With the option of supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda openly, being shut down by the US ultimatum to Musharraf, the Pakistani regime started off with the other option of proliferating nuclear capability to America's enemies.

Whatever Musharraf may say today, it is a fact that the Jihadi movement developed further under him. The Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) was founded when he was in power. The JeM was founded openly at Karachi by Masood Azhar who was released in exchange for the passengers the Indian airliner hijacked to Kandahar by the Al Qaeda in December 2000. It was during Musharraf's regime that the Jihadis openly started collecting funds at Pakistani Petrol Pumps and other public places. The American ultimatum after 9/11 closed all this and so had to be replaced by something more sinister - nuclear proliferation was this sinister Pakistani option. Where the Musharraf regime erred was that it wanted to keep helping the Jihadis secretly while making show of supporting the USA. It was this show of support to the USA, that brought the ire of the Jihadis upon Musharraf and led to the failed assassination attempts on him. But while the world is swayed by these sensational assassination attempts on him, we would tend to overlook the more sinister and infinitely more dangerous role of the Pakistani regime of nuclear proliferation. All the protestations of 400% guarantees on part of Musharraf against Pakistani nuclear proliferation are a sham and if we believe him, we shall be bringing peril on ourselves.

With the meetings of highly motivated Islamist nuclear black marketeers Like Abdul Qadeer Khan and Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood with Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and the Pakistani Islamic terror group Lashkar-e-Toiba: Pak N-experts close to al-Qaeda, should we still disbelieve that the Al Qaeda is close to having nuclear capability?

Photo credit US News, Story Credit: Times of India