Pakistan Shares Data From Scientist

Pakistani officials said Tuesday that they were sharing with other countries information divulged by disgraced top scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, but they refused to comment on a report that he had visited a secret underground plant in North Korea and seen nuclear devices.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Khan, considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, told interrogators he had inspected the weapons briefly during a trip to North Korea five years ago.

If true, it would be the first time that any foreigner has reported inspecting an actual North Korean nuclear weapon, the newspaper said. The report cited unnamed Asian and American officials who had been briefed by the Pakistanis.

Jon B. Wolfsthal, who served as a U.S. government monitor at North Korea’s main plutonium site in the 1990s, said Khan could be lying about seeing the weapons to protect his own interests.

“One way of doing that is saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what we sold to North Korea because they had weapons already,’ ” said Wolfsthal, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Information Minister Sheik Rashid Ahmed said Tuesday that Pakistan had shared with other countries information from its investigations of Khan, but he did not elaborate.

“We have investigated scientists. We are in touch with the world,” he told a news conference in Islamabad, the capital.

A top South Korean official confirmed Tuesday that Seoul had received information linked to the Times report from Pakistan and “related countries.”