New Delhi: Barely a month before the 9/11 terror attacks, two Pakistani nuclear scientists, said to be close to the disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, met up with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and offered to supply atomic weapons to him, a newly released book has said.
Chaudiri Abdul Majeed and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who held a series of senior posts in Pakistani nuke programme, went to the Taliban headquarters in Kandahar in mid-August 2001 and spent three days with Laden who was keen to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the book says.
M a h m o o d was said to be more close to Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb” and the mastermind behind a vast clandestine enterprise that soldnuclear secrets to rogue states like Iran, North Korea and Libya. He also set up the pilot plant for Pakistan’s uranium-enrichment programme.
However, the so-called deal did not materialise as the meeting between the Pakistani nuclear scientists and Laden ended inconclusively after the Qaida leader, along with some of his senior associates, abruptly left for the mountains of northwestern Afghanistan.
According to the book, The Man From Pakistan—The True Story of the World’s Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler—before leaving, bin Laden had told his followers that “something great was going to happen”. A couple of weeks later, 9/11 happened.
The book is authored by journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins.
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