*ISLAMABAD:* Pakistani atomic scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan is hailed as anational hero for transforming his country into the world’s first Islamicnuclear power but regarded by the West as a dangerous renegade responsiblefor smuggling technology to rogue states.
Revered as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, Khan was lauded forbringing the nation up to par with arch-rival India in the atomic field andmaking its defences “impregnable”.
But he found himself in the crosshairs of controversy when he was accusedof illegally proliferating nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and NorthKorea.
Khan was placed under effective house arrest in the capital Islamabad in2004 after he admitted running a proliferation network to the threecountries.
In 2006, during his house arrest, Khan suffered from prostate cancer, butrecovered after surgery.
A court ended his house arrest in February 2009, but Khan has to informauthorities of his movements in advance, even within Islamabad, withsecurity accompanying him on his every step.
Born in Bhopal, India on April 1, 1936, Khan was just a young boy when hisfamily migrated to Pakistan during the bloody 1947 partition of thesub-continent at the end of British colonial rule.
He did a science degree at Karachi University in 1960, then went on tostudy metallurgical engineering in Berlin before completing advancedstudies in the Netherlands and Belgium.
The 81-year-old’s crucial contribution to Pakistan’s nuclear programme wasthe procurement of a blueprint for uranium centrifuges, which transformuranium into weapons-grade fuel for nuclear fissile material.
He was charged with stealing it from The Netherlands while working forAnglo-Dutch-German nuclear engineering consortium Urenco, and bringing itback to Pakistan in 1976.
On his return to Pakistan, then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto put Khanin charge of the government’s nascent uranium enrichment project.
By 1978, his team had enriched uranium and by 1984 they were ready todetonate a nuclear device, Khan later said in a newspaper interview.
The 1998 nuclear test saw Pakistan slapped with international sanctions andsent its economy into freefall.
Khan’s aura began to dim in March 2001 when then president PervezMusharraf, reportedly under US pressure, removed him from the chairmanshipof Kahuta Research Laboratories and made him a special adviser.
But Pakistan’s nuclear establishment never expected to see its most reveredhero subjected to questioning.
The move came after Islamabad received a letter from the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency, a UN watchdog, containing allegations that Pakistaniscientists were the source of sold-off nuclear knowledge.
Khan said in a speech to the Pakistan Institute of National Affairs in 1990that he had shopped around on world markets while developing Pakistan’snuclear programme.
“It was not possible for us to make each and every piece of equipmentwithin the country,” he said.
‘I saved the country’
Khan was pardoned by Musharraf after his confession but later retracted hisremarks.
“I saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclearnation and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame onmyself,” Khan told AFP in an interview in 2008 while under effective housearrest.
The scientist believed in nuclear defence as the best deterrent.
After Islamabad carried out atomic tests in 1998 in response to tests byIndia, Khan said Pakistan “never wanted to make nuclear weapons. It wasforced to do so”.
Six years ago Khan tried his luck in the political arena, forming a party –the Tehreek-e-Tahafuz Pakistan (TTP), or the Save Pakistan Movement – inJuly 2012 in hopes of winning votes on the basis of the respect he stillcommands in Pakistan.
But he dissolved it a year later after none of its 111 candidates won aseat in national elections.
Khan also stirred a new controversy six years ago when, in an interview tomass circulated Urdu daily Jang newspaper, he said he transferred nucleartechnology to two countries on the direction of slain prime ministerBenazir Bhutto.
Khan did not name the countries, nor did he mention when Bhutto, thetwice-elected prime minister who was assassinated in 2007, issued theorders.
“I was not independent but was bound to abide by the orders of the primeminister,” he was quoted as saying.
Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party denied the claim as “baseless andunfounded”.
None of the controversies appear to have dented Khan’s popularity, evenyears on.
He regularly writes op-ed pieces, often preaching the value of a scientificeducation, for the popular Jang group of Urdu newspapers.
Many schools, universities, institutes and charity hospitals acrossPakistan are named after him, his portrait decorating their signs,stationery and websites.