Abdul Qadeer Khan

Abdul Qadeer Khan was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer, born in Bhopal on 1 April 1936 and died in Islamabad on 10 October 2021. A Muhajir emigrant who migrated from India to Pakistan in 1952, he was educated in the metallurgical engineering departments of Western European technical universities, where he worked on phase transitions of metallic alloys and uranium metallurgy. He founded the laboratory at Kahuta that built Pakistan's uranium enrichment programme, and became a national icon in Pakistan. ¹

In April 1976 Khan joined Pakistan's atomic bomb programme in its enrichment division. On his proposal the work was separated from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and he founded the Engineering Research Laboratories at Kahuta — later renamed Khan Research Laboratories — which produced enriched uranium by gas centrifuge, using designs he had studied at the Urenco enrichment consortium in the Netherlands. The programme underpinned the nuclear devices Pakistan tested in 1998. ^{1 2}

Evidence that centrifuge technology and designs had passed from his network to other countries led to a debriefing by the Musharraf administration in January 2004; on 4 February 2004 Khan confessed on television, and President Pervez Musharraf pardoned him the next day. He remained under house arrest for years, and was freed by court order in 2009. He served as science adviser to the presidential secretariat from 2001 to 2004, and in 2012 briefly formed a political movement, Tehreek-e-Tahaffuz-e-Pakistan, dissolved in 2013. ¹

He married Hendrina Reterink, a Dutch national, in 1963, and the couple settled in Pakistan in 1975. The English article records that he maintained a strong religious outlook and wrote newspaper columns on issues affecting Muslim communities. He was admitted to hospital with COVID-19 in August 2021 and died in Islamabad on 10 October 2021, aged 85. He was given a state funeral at Faisal Mosque and buried in the H-8 graveyard in Islamabad. ¹