Pakistan Frees 3 Staff Members of Nuclear Lab
NEW DELHI — Pakistani authorities released a top nuclear scientist and two former army officers Saturday, after having held them in solitary confinement for more than half a year on suspicion that they aided a black market in nuclear weapons.
The men, who were never charged with a crime, worked at Pakistan's main government nuclear weapons facility under Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the country's atomic bomb, who admitted in February that he sold nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea from 1989 until at least 2000.
Early Saturday, authorities dropped the three detained members of Khan's staff at their homes, where they are in effect under house arrest. They are Nazir Ahmed, Khan's director-general of science and technology; retired army Brig. Sajawal Khan Malik, the lab's security director; and retired Maj. Islam ul-Haq, Khan's personal assistant.
Pakistani investigators suspected that at least 11 staff members at the top-secret Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta, near Islamabad, were involved in the nuclear arms racket. Yet none has been charged after lengthy detentions and interrogations.
Pakistan's president, and army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, insists that Khan acted without the government's knowledge or support.
But there is widespread doubt in Pakistan that Khan and anyone who helped him could have circumvented strict security measures for more than a decade.
Musharraf formally pardoned Khan in February after having declared the previous month that anyone involved in leaking Pakistan's nuclear weapons secrets would be treated with "an iron hand."
Only one of at least 26 Pakistanis detained in the investigation of the nuclear proliferation remains in detention. He is Mohammed Farooq, Khan's director-general of foreign procurement, who was taken in for questioning in December.
The three men released Saturday were picked up Jan. 17 and held in solitary confinement at a secret location in sweltering rooms about 10 feet by 12 feet, said Ul-Haq's brother, Mohammed Hassam ul-Haq.
The temperature in the locked rooms often exceeded 110 degrees, Mohammed ul-Haq added.
"I think that solitary confinement is itself a torture," he said in a telephone interview from Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
"He was in there for over six months even though the law says nobody can be held in solitary confinement for more than 15 days," he said.
