Pakistani`s disgraced nuclear scientist Khan freed, feels vindicated

ISLAMABAD, Feb. 6 Kyodo - A Pakistani court declared disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan a free
man Friday, abolishing his house arrest and other government-imposed
restrictions in a decision Khan said has vindicated him.
''The court decision vindicates my position,'' the 72-year-old nuclear
scientist told Kyodo News in an exclusive interview at his residence as
reporters, photographers and television crew thronged outside the main gate.
It was his first interview since the Islamabad High Court declared him a free
man, saying the nuclear proliferation allegations made against him had not been
substantiated.
Khan, who headed Pakistan's nuclear enrichment program from 1976 to 2001,
confessed in 2004 to transferring nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North
Korea, but he later retracted the confession and claimed he had been framed and
made a scapegoat.
Despite being pardoned in 2004 by then President Pervez Musharraf in
consideration of his services to Pakistan's nuclear program, he had been under
virtual house arrest since then.
According to Friday's court verdict, Khan is now free to talk to the media and
express his views in public, free to carry out research and free to move across
the country so long as he informs the government of his movements in advance,
for security reasons.
''The High Court has declared him a free man. He will have all the rights
available to people under the Constitution and the Quran,'' one of his lawyers,
Iqbal Jaffery, told reporters.
In the interview, Khan thanked the leaders of the present government of Prime
Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, especially Rehman Malik, the prime minister's
adviser for interior affairs.
The court ruling came on the heels of a report submitted at its request by the
Interior Ministry to explain why restrictions had been imposed on Khan's
movement, after a petition against his detention was earlier moved by his wife
Handrina Khan.
Asked if he had been officially conveyed the court decision that restrictions
on his movement were being removed, Khan told Kyodo, ''Would you (otherwise) be
sitting in my drawing room?''
His British wife of Dutch origin, his daughter Ayesha and a family friend were
also present during the interview.
Khan said he would travel to Lahore and Karachi within the next few days to
thank friends such as Majid Nizami, editor-in-chief of the Nawa-e-Waqt
newspapers, who had championed his cause through his newspaper and television
network.
Khan told reporters outside his house that he has no plan to file a suit for
damages against Musharraf, whom Khan had last year called a ''mean,
treacherous, foreign agent'' in an article he penned that appeared in a local
newspaper.
''He has already been punished for his misdeeds,'' he said.
In the article appearing in the Urdu-language newspaper Jang last November,
Khan wrote that Musharraf, who resigned as president last August, ''has been
disgraced fully, shunted out of the presidency.''
''Now that self-styled commando cannot set foot on the streets of Pakistan for
his whole life. If he does, people would tear him into pieces and serve them to
crows and kites,'' he wrote.
==Kyodo