Japanese businessmen reveal murky trade deals with AQ Khan

Two Japanese businessmen have disclosed details of secret trade deals they had with Pakistan's disgraced scientist AQ Khan, underscoring their "profit-first" business attitude that disregarded the threat of nuclear proliferation, the media here reported on Tuesday.
    
Their remarks shed new light on the connection between Khan, dubbed the "father of Pakistan's nuclear programme," and Japanese companies, Kyodo news agency reported.

One of the deals, which ultimately failed, was related to a missile part procurement through Khan's late business associate Mian Mohammad Farooq, who headed a Pakistani trading company in Karachi, it said.

According to one of the Japanese businessmen, a former employee of Western Trading, a midsize Tokyo-based trading company, Farooq placed an order with the firm to procure the top parts of missiles called 'nose cones' around 1980.

"He sent us a design plan which it was obvious to everyone was the head of a missile," the businessman said on condition of anonymity.

The businessman, who acted as a middleman between Japanese companies and Farooq, then took the design plan to a metal factory in Tokyo's Ota Ward, which has many similar factories with high levels of manufacturing capability.

He described in detail his conversations with a metal factory employee. "When I was asked where this stuff would be exported to, I said 'It will go to Pakistan.' Then the order was rejected," he recalled. 

Japan has adhered since late 1967 to its "Three Principles on Arms Export" which prohibit the business sector from exporting arms to countries that are involved in or could be engaged in military conflicts, the report noted.

Two Pakistani nuclear research institutes, the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, were developing missiles at the time as delivery vehicles for nuclear warheads.

The Japanese businessman also revealed details of successful exports of ring-magnets to Farooq, which Khan admitted were important parts in creating his nuclear centrifuges, special devices for enriching uranium to produce nuclear fissile material.

Khan, who ran the KRL at the time, was in charge of developing a nuclear weapon with enriched uranium, the report said.

The Japanese businessman remembered the transfer of the ring-magnets to Pakistan via commercial flights in the 1980s. "They had such strong magnetic power that we had to erase it during the flight. The destination was Karachi," he said.

The ring-magnets were exported to Farooq on more than two occasions.

He also revealed a failed attempt to export power supply inverters to Khan, who had signed a contract in Islamabad in 1979 for the purchase of the inverters, which are vital in supplying electricity to centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

Asked what made him so strongly seek to trade with Farooq and Khan, the businessman replied without hesitation -- "We have to sell products. We have to raise our corporate profits. I made a lot of business deals without any fears."

The other Japanese businessman who told Kyodo about the details of his dealings with Khan is a former employee of Japan Electron Optics Laboratory (JEOL), a top Japanese maker of electron microscopes.

"Over five years, I visited him (Khan) about ten times or so. He was such a friendly person. I always dined with him," the former JEOL employee recalled.

He affirmed that JEOL had sold two microscopes and an X-ray diffractometer and that JEOL had accepted junior associates of Khan for training in assembling the microscopes, each of which weighed about 2,000 kilograms.

The KRL was classified as a national top secret, so no Japanese engineer was allowed to enter it, even to carry or assemble microscopes.

Once he witnessed Khan talking with his associates in front of a spherical object like a soccer ball. He said he did not understand the conversation as it was in Urdu, but added, "It was a discussion about where an implosion device would be attached to (an atomic bomb)."

It was "an open secret" for him that Khan had been engaged in nuclear development, the report quoted the Japanese businessman as saying.