Nuclear scientists could hold key to Pearl murder - Levy

Top Pakistani nuclear scientists could hold the key to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

They are more important than London School of Economics undergraduate Omar Sheikh who trapped the intrepid journalist and facilitated his subsequent capture and beheading.

So says French philosopher and occasional special envoy Bernard-Henry Levy, author of the recently published Who Killed Daniel Pearl, who travelled to Pakistan and Afghanis-tan to investigate the killing.

During the course of his year-long research Levy interviewed a number of Pakistanis, including local freelance journalists and translators, who helped Pearl, shortly after he arrived in Karachi in October 2001.

The US air force had by then started bombing Al Qaida and Taliban hideouts in Afghanistan but the mass evacuation of their key officials and supporters was still some weeks away. Like any other professional journalist, Pearl had a vital professional interest in following what was going on in Afghanis-tan and the events leading up to the bombing campaign that forced Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and their henchmen to flee the country.

In particular Pearl wanted to trace the connection between shoe bomber Richard Reid and his mentor, Pakistan-based Pir Mubarak Shah Gilani, who heads a little known Islamic organisation called Al Fuqrah.

But as he was launching his investigation into the links between Reid and Gilani, the US journalist was also looking into an even more shadowy and dangerous by-product of the Afghan crisis. This was the emerging collaboration between Osama bin Laden and two highly regarded scientists from Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission, Sultan Bashir Mahmoud and Chaudhri Abdul Majid.

The two men were founders of an Islamic charity, Umma Tameer-e- Nau (UTN), headed by a former Pakistani ISI intelligence chief called Hamid Gul.

Both Mahmoud and Majid had worked under a third Pakistani scientist, Dr Abdul Qadir Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb.

It is nuclear laboratories outside Rawaplindi named after Khan that have utilised blueprints the scientist obtained from Holland to make the enriched uranium that Pakistan uses for its nuclear warheads. Uncovering the links between Mahmoud, Majid and Khan prompted Pearl to start digging into how Khan, the best known of the three scientists, was spending his time.

His discovery, according to Levy, that Khan allegedly played a key role in transferring Pakistani nuclear bomb secrets to North Korea in exchange for Pyongyang's missile technology, was dangerous stuff.

No nuclear establishment takes kindly to foreigners prying into its nuclear secrets. A decade ago in Pakistan the teenage son of a British embassy employee in Islamabad was roughed up by security personnel when he accidentally crashed his motor bicycle close to Khan's residence in Islamabad. Likewise foreign journalists who have tried to approach Khan have either been beaten up or had their lives threatened.

In Pearl's case he seems to have uncovered a link that developed between Khan's colleagues – Mahmoud and Majid – and Bin Laden. Afghanistan did not and does not have the kind of heavy industrial skills and access to endless supplies of cheap electric power that could result in the generation of sufficient enriched uranium or plutonium for a nuclear weapons programme.

Nevertheless, judging from the small amount of information that leaked out after the arrest and interrogation of the two scientists by US experts, both had lengthy discussions about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons with the Al Qaida hierarchy in Kabul and Kandahar.

The two Pakistani scientists may not have had the expertise themselves to develop a nuclear warhead, but their contacts within the scientific community and their knowledge of nuclear engineering processes were priceless assets for bin Laden. So were their contacts with other Pakistani nuclear scientists like their mentor Khan.

One of the interesting discoveries made by US troops when they raided Mahmoud's UTN offices in Kabul were plans to float a helium balloon stuffed with toxic substances across the US. Bin Laden's interest in nuclear weapons has been well documented. One of his lieutenants and co-founders of Al Qaida, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, tried to obtain fissile material from Ukraine.

Bin Laden himself is said to have personally authorised the gift of two tonnes of heroin and $30 million in cash to the Chechens in exchange for their help in obtaining radiological material.

Levy believes that bin Laden may even have managed to get access to one of the MK 47 so-called nuclear suitcase bombs that went missing from Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Finding loyal and willing scientists who could tell him how best to make use of the suitcase bombs, if and when one fell into his hands, would have been a bin Laden priority.

How far Pearl was able to dig into the activities of Mahmoud and Majid and the extent to which he offended nuclear diehards, has yet to be established. What is known is that Mahmoud was interrogated by the Americans shortly after the fall of Kabul. He subsequently suffered a heart attack and has retired to Karachi. Majid was transferred to the Pakistan embassy in Rangoon, where he remains, and Khan is as elusive as ever. Meanwhile Pearl, who was vitally interested in these three men and their links with Al Qaida, is dead.