Pakistani nuclear scientists A Q Khan and Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood had held meetings with Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, exchanged letters with militant groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba and attended their gatherings and rallies, a media report said. “When the CIA searched (Sultan Bashiruddin) Mehmood’s UTN (Umma Tameere-Nau) office in Kabul, they found large amounts of data on the construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons from the Kahuta laboratories. It also found letters exchanged between the UTN and Islamist extremist organisations including Lashkar-e-Toiba,” a report in Pakistani weekly Friday Times said. Mehmood, a close confidante of A Q Khan and a former director of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, was arrested on October 23, 2001, at the headquarters of the UTN which he had set up for “humanitarian work in Afghanistan”, it said. Quoting the famed journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the article said Khan and Mehmood and other scientists of his organisation “attended Lashkar-e-Toiba gatherings”. Full Story
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