Pakistani atomic bomb ‘father’ Abdul Qadeer Khan dies aged 85

Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Controversial figure known as the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb died on Sunday at the KRL hospital in the capital Islamabad, after a long illnesssaid the country’s interior minister. He was 85 years old.

“Around six in the morning (1:00 GMT), Dr. Abdul Qadeer started vomiting blood and was transferred to hospital, where he did not survive and died at 6:30 a.m.″ Said a spokesperson for the late scientist, Muhammed Farooq.

Khan was admitted on September 26 to the hospital in the Pakistani capital named in his honor after contracting the coronavirus, and a few days later he was transferred to a military medical center in nearby Rawalpindi, where he was placed under respiratory support.

The scientist however recovered and was released on October 1.

“He was fine, I spoke to him last night and I don’t know what happened today,” Farooq said.

According to some media, he will be buried with state honors on Sunday afternoon in a mosque in the capital.

Khan set Pakistan on the path to becoming a nuclear power in the early 1970s. Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad said he died in a hospital in Islamabad. He did not develop.

Khan was mired in a controversy that began even before he returned to Pakistan from the Netherlands in the 1970s, where he had worked at a nuclear research facility.

Later was accused of stealing uranium enrichment technology from the centrifuge at the Dutch facility which he would later use to develop Pakistan’s first nuclear weapon, according to research from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Khan, who holds a doctorate in metallurgical engineering from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, proposed to launch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program in 1974 after neighboring India carried out its first “peaceful nuclear explosion”.

He approached then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, offering him technology for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Bhutto, still smart about the loss of East Pakistan in 1971 to Bangladesh, as well as the capture of 90,000 Pakistani troops by India, said: “We (Pakistanis) will eat grass, we will even starve, but we will have ours (nuclear bomb)”.

Since then, Pakistan has relentlessly pursued its nuclear weapons program in collaboration with India. Both are declared nuclear-weapon states after carrying out tit-for-tat nuclear weapons testing in 1998.

Pakistan’s nuclear program and Khan’s involvement have long been the subject of accusations and criticism.

Khan was accused by the United States of exchanging nuclear secrets with neighboring Iran and North Korea in the 1990s after Washington sanctioned Pakistan for its nuclear weapons program. For 10 years, during the Soviet occupation of neighboring Afghanistan, successive US presidents certified that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons. Certification was required under US law to enable US aid to anti-Communist rebels across Pakistan.

But in 1990, just months after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Washington slapped Pakistan with crippling sanctions that ended all aid to the country, including military and humanitarian aid.

Pakistan has been accused of selling nuclear weapon technology to North Korea in exchange for its No-Dong missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. A 2003 congressional investigative report said that while it was difficult to determine the genesis of Pakistan’s nuclear cooperation with North Korea, it likely began in the mid-1990s.

At his home in Pakistan, Khan was introduced as a hero and the father of the nuclear bomb. Radical religious parties have called him the father of the only Islamic nuclear bomb.

Khan was shunned by Pakistani dictator General President Pervez Musharraf after 2001 when details of Khan’s alleged sales of nuclear secrets came under renewed scrutiny. Khan bitterly denounced Musharraf and his attempt to alienate the state from its activities, still denying any involvement in the covert sale or clandestine exchange of nuclear weapons technology.

In recent years, Khan has lived mostly out of the public eye, and tributes from fellow Pakistani scientists and politicians began shortly after his death.

Prime Minister Imran Khan called him a “national icon” whose nuclear weapons program “provided us with security against an aggressive and much larger nuclear neighbor. To the Pakistani people, he was a national icon.”

His fellow scientist, Dr Samar Mubarakmand, said Khan was a national treasure who defied Western attempts to quell Pakistan’s nuclear program.

“It was unthinkable for the West for Pakistan to make any progress, but they ultimately had to recognize Dr Khan’s achievements in building the country’s nuclear weapons,” he said.

(with information from AP, EP and EFE)

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