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ISLAMABAD, May 31: Father of the country's nuclear program, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, has said the confession had been forced upon me by President Pervez Musharraf.
"It was not of my own free will. It was put into my hand," he said in an interview.
Dr Qadeer has said now he hopes that the newly elected prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, will "set him free."
He swore never to cooperate with investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), despite persistent misgivings that nuclear technology traded by his accomplices could fall into terrorist hands.
"Why should I talk to them?" he said. "I am under no obligation. We are not a signatory to the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty]. I have not violated international laws."
"As long as you are living there is always hope," he said, adding that he would wait for pressing economic and political crises to pass.
Reports that nuclear technology was smuggled abroad were "western rubbish", he said, and unfavourable accounts of his life were "shit piles". He brusquely dismissed nicknames such as "the Merchant of Menace" from a Time magazine cover.
He dismissed reports that he owned 43 houses in Islamabad, had many bank accounts and owned a $10m hotel in Timbuktu, Mali. "The journalists should have gone and seen - it was an eight-room mud-brick house where the poor people reside," he said, referring to the latter. Asked if he was rich he answered: "Never was, never will be."
But for all his defiant talk, one subject remains out of bounds for Khan.
Dr Qadeer refuses to discuss the issue. "I don't want to talk about it. Those things are to forget about," he said.
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