Pakistan not to allow IAEA inspection of nuclear facilities, Ambassador Qazi

WASHINGTON, Mar 28 (APP)- Ambassador Ashraf Jehangir Qazi Sunday said Pakistan will not allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection of nuclear facilities, though it will continue to cooperate with the United Nations agency.

He said this in an interview with Jonathan Curiel, staff writer of 'The San Francisco Chronicle' appearing Sunday.

Ambassador Qazi said Pakistan will not accept any such request."We won't allow any intrusive inspections of our sites -- no state does that, and neither will we," Qazi said.

"We are mindful of our own sovereign independence and sites. Those are off-limits. That doesn't mean we can't work out modalities which can provide the necessary information. Within those parameters, we will cooperate with the IAEA, and I think we'll be able to work out something where they can verify or ascertain whatever informationthey need."

The newspaper referred to Dr. A. Q. Khan's confessions with respect to leakage of nuclear know-how ny socalled Khan network.Iran says it's developing a nuclear program for peaceful purposes. It says traces of highly enriched uranium found in Iran by IAEA inspectors came from contaminated equipment bought from Khan'snetwork -- not from its own equipment.

Without getting into any debate, Qazi said Pakistan is continuing its own investigation of Khan, who is under virtual house arrest despite being pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf.

"His pardon is conditional on him cooperating fully with Pakistan and (on) obtaining information about the proliferation network that he set up," Qazi said. "We have made it quite clear that if anything were to surface that led to him -- which was not included in his confessions -- his pardon would not cover those acts. For the time being, he's confined to his own home and is under surveillance."

Mr. Qazi was in San Francisco to address a local chapter of Developments in Literacy, an organization that supports education in remote villages of Pakistan.

Talking about Pakistan's military operation to arrest al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal regions near Afghanistan, he said Islamabad is not doing it under U.S. pressure.

"The operations that are going on in South Waziristan are really in the interests of Pakistan itself," he said.

"Extremism is something that will blight our prospects of becoming a modern country. America is enhancing our capability of dealing with this issue. There is domestic criticism in Pakistan (of cooperation with the United States)." In this behalf, he referred to parliamentary proceedings and reports carried by the media.

The vast majority of Pakistanis knows there is no alternative but to take these tough measures in order to exterminate these extremists. We don't see these extremists as friends of Pakistan, nor as proper interpreters of what Islam requires of people."

Later, he left for New York.