[cdn-nucl-l] Nuclear scientists possibly involved with chemical weapons

[Adam McLean <adam.mclean@utoronto.ca>]

Posted on the UK Guardian Unlimited on November 29, 2001 and at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/anthrax/story/0,1520,608565,00.html
Not a link to the nuclear community that we want...

Adam

---------

Pakistani nuclear scientists questioned over chemical weapons 

Two men held again over links to Taliban 

Rory McCarthy in Kabul
Thursday November 29, 2001
The Guardian 

Pakistani investigators said last night they were interrogating two nuclear 
scientists about suspicions that they helped Osama bin Laden develop chemical 
weapons using anthrax. 
The New York Times said that an office used by the men in Kabul contained 
documents about the history of anthrax and a Pentagon programme to immunise the 
US military against anthrax attacks. 

Also in the office were plans for building a balloon and what appeared to be a 
rocket, as well as gas masks and material from militant Islamic groups. The 
newspaper said the balloon diagrams seemed to show a method of dispersing a 
chemical or biological agent from the air. 

Pakistani officials said they had no direct evidence that the two scientists 
were working on anthrax. 

It is the second time in a month that Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul 
Majid, both retired scientists who worked on Pakistan's nuclear programme, have 
been questioned. After leaving Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission, they set up 
an aid agency which operated inside Afghanistan and had close contacts with the 
Taliban. 

Dr Mahmood's family has admitted he met Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's 
supreme leader, on several occasions. Pakistani officials have said he also met 
Bin Laden at least twice. 

According to Pakistani intelligence officials, the two men avoided some 
questions and hid facts during the first round of interrogation in late 
October. 

The men were arrested a second time because of new information from US sources 
in Afghanistan, which included detail about the men's links with the Taliban's 
agriculture ministry, which US officials suspect was involved in researching 
chemical weapons including anthrax. 

General Rashid Qureshi, spokesman for the military regime, said only that the 
two men were suspected of violating service rules that apply to government 
scientists after their retirement, and of violating travel restrictions. There 
was no evidence to link them to the US anthrax cases. 

Dr Mahmood's mother, Fazi lat Bibi, lodged a petition at the Lahore high court 
yesterday to demand her son's release. She pressed the court not to allow 
Pakistani intelligence officers to hand the men to another country or a foreign 
intelligence agency. 

Dr Mahmood, 63, designed Pakistan's first plutonium-producing nuclear plant at 
Khushab, a heavy-water reactor near Lahore which reportedly can produce enough 
plutonium for five bombs a year. He was forced to retire in 1998 after he 
criticised moves by the Pakistan government towards signing the comprehensive 
test ban treaty. 

He set up an organisation called Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, the Reconstruction of the 
Islamic Community, which raised money to develop Taliban-held areas of 
Afghanistan and built a flour mill near Kandahar. He was last in Afghanistan in 
May.