Free Republic

Gangs with suspected Russian ties sought to sell radioactive material through Moldova to buyers from the Middle East, including the Islamic State group. CHISINAU, Moldova — In the backwaters of Eastern Europe, authorities working with the FBI have interrupted four attempts in the past five years by gangs with suspected Russian connections that sought to sell radioactive material to Middle Eastern extremists, The Associated Press has learned. The latest known case came in February this year, when a smuggler offered a huge cache of deadly cesium — enough to contaminate several city blocks — and specifically sought a buyer from...

The Black Sea region is the center of the world's nuclear black market, with Russia being the known or suspected source of most nuclear contraband and Turkey the preferred destination. To date, known attempts at nuclear smuggling have been unsuccessful, because the insiders who stole fissile material were not experienced at finding buyers and moving the material across country borders. Recently, however, organized crime appears to have become involved in some nuclear trafficking. Such involvement threatens to change the nuclear terrorism equation, providing the marketing and transportation expertise previously lacking. The US response to nuclear smuggling is handled by the...

PAKISTAN SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON: The United States warned Tuesday that reputed Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has regained freedom of movement in Pakistan, still risks spreading his nuclear weapons know-how. It stopped short of criticizing its ally in the war on terror but recalled that Washington has long raised with Islamabad its fears about Khan, who five years ago admitted leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya." SNIPPET: "David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and nuclear specialist, told AFP that ‘it is a mistake’ to remove restrictions on a man who cannot be ‘trusted.’He said there is...

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan sought to allay U.S. concern about the freedom of notorious nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, insisting Saturday that his network which allegedly supplied Iran and North Korea with atomic technology has been probed and dismantled and cannot rise again. Khan, feted in Pakistan for his key role in making it a nuclear weapons state, emerged from five years of de facto house arrest on Friday after a court declared him a "free citizen" subject to a secret agreement with the government.

Disgraced Pakistan A-bomb scientist declared free By MUNIR AHMAD – 1 hour agoISLAMABAD (AP) — The man who made Pakistan into a nuclear power and later took responsibility for leaking atomic secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya walked out of his home Friday after reaching a secret deal with the government that ended years of de facto house arrest.The decision to grant freedom of movement to Abdul Qadeer Khan stirred alarm in Washington, which worries that Iran has continued to pursue nuclear arms and that Pakistan may not be able to safeguard its own arsenal in the face...

Pakistan's disgraced nuclear scientist AQ Khan, who has been accused of running a proliferation network, Friday walked out a free man after the Islamabad High Court ended his house arrest. "These things happen. We should forget and look forward," Khan said after being declared a free man by the court. Khan told reporters that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif had also been "inside". "The government had made arrangements and nobody could hurt me. Now also, the government will take care," Khan said. Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Aslam, while announcing a verdict on several petitions...

Barely a month before the 9/11 terror attacks, two Pakistani nuclear scientists, said to be close to disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, met up with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and offered to supply him with atomic weapons, according to a newly released book Chaudiri Abdul Majeed and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who held a series of senior posts in Pakistani nuke programme, went to Taliban headquarters in Kandahar in mid-August 2001 and spent three days with bin Laden who was keen on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the book says. In fact, Mahmood was said to be more close to Khan,...

Syria, NKorea helped Iran develop nuclear programme: German report Sat Jun 21, 1:57 PM ET Damascus and Pyongyang helped Iran to develop its nuclear programme through the construction of a suspected nuclear site in Syria that Israel destroyed last September, Der Spiegel reported. But the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is considering withdrawing his support for the Iranian programme, added the German newsweekly in its next edition out Monday, quoting German secret service reports. According to those intelligence reports, it said, a joint plan by Syria, North Korea and Iran for a nuclear reactor for military use was to have been...

Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has been living in official disgrace for more than four years, confined to his estate in Islamabad after confessing that he sold nuclear technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea. But his image as a national hero remains intact for most of his countrymen, who still regard him as the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the man who brought pride to a downtrodden country. Since the new coalition government took the reins in Pakistan this spring, momentum has been building to free Khan from house arrest and restore him to his former glory. As...

Imagine clicking and downloading your own nuclear-bomb blueprints. That, it seems, is what the nuclear-technology-smuggling ring led by renegade Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan allowed its customers to do, for the right price. A former top UN nuclear-weapons expert revealed Sunday that laptops captured from the Khan ring contained a step-by-step blueprint for building a modern nuke. Bottom line: In the digital age, the know-how to become a nuclear power is only a mouse click away for a rogue nation like Iran. The story reads like a Ted Bell thriller. The ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003 prompted Libya's Moammar...

The discovery of designs for a compact nuclear bomb has raised fears that Iran and North Korea might have obtained blueprints enabling them to mount long-range strikes with nuclear-armed missiles. Designs for a nuclear device small enough to fit on a ballistic missile were found on computers linked to the international smuggling ring that supplied nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, a top US expert says.

WMDs: Blueprints for a nuclear weapon compatible with the ballistic missiles of Iran, North Korea and other rogue states were found on computers of the notorious Khan smuggling ring. Will a complacent world wake up?It's clear that it's getting easier to build and use a nuclear bomb. If civilized countries want to stop their biggest cities from becoming radioactive craters, they'd better implement a no-tolerance policy against nuclear proliferation. It's unacceptable to find — four years after their seizure — that computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities housed sophisticated electronic designs for a Pakistani atomic bomb, in a...

WASHINGTON: Four years after Abdul Qadeer Khan, the leader of the world's largest atomic black market, was put under house arrest and his operation declared over, international inspectors and Western officials are confronting a new mystery left by him, this time over who may have received blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon found on his network's computers. Working in secret for two years, investigators have tracked the digitized blueprints to Khan computers in Switzerland, Dubai, Malaysia and Thailand. The blueprints are electronic and rapidly reproducible for creating a weapon that is relatively small and easy to hide, making...

(AP / WASHINGTON) — An international smuggling ring may have secretly shared blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon with Iran, North Korea and other rogue countries, The Washington Post reported Sunday The smuggling ring was led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

An international smuggling ring may have secretly shared blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon with Iran, North Korea and other rogue countries, The Washington Post reported Sunday. The now-defunct ring led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan is previously known to have sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea. A draft report by former top United Nations arms inspector David Albright says the smugglers also acquired designs for building a more sophisticated compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and other developing countries, according to the Post...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The garden is in full bloom at Abdul Qadeer Khan's house. A lazy summer haze has settled over his manse, and at the small police substation across the way, several men chitchatted amiably on a recent day, barely glancing at the upscale villa that for the past four years has been part prison, part palatial refuge for the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Until very recently, Khan has been virtually cut off from the world -- banished to house arrest by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf after admitting in a national television broadcast in 2004 to selling nuclear...

AQ Khan recants nuclear admission WASHINGTON: Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan told the US media on Tuesday that he was not responsible for passing nuclear secrets to Iran and Libya, back-pedalling from his earlier admissions. In an interview with the McClatchy news organisation, Khan said he had introduced Tripoli and Tehran to Western businesses that provided information on building a nuclear weapons programme. Khan had confessed in February 2004 that he had run a network that passed atomic secrets, equipment and technological advice to Iran, North Korea and Libya over a period of 15 years, a statement he recanted...

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets. Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office. She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey. Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in...

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets. Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office. She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey. Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in...

In a troubling disclosure, the Russian Federal Customs Service has revealed that authorities thwarted more than 850 attempts to smuggle highly radioactive materials...