TIMBUKTU, Mali — The disgraced father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb made repeated trips to uranium-rich African nations with his nuclear chiefs and suppliers at a time when he was seeking customers and materials for his black-market trade, according to hotel records and witnesses.
Abdul Qadeer Khan and his entourage traveled as late as February 2002 — a year after Pakistan said it had shut down his nuclear trafficking — and used a hotel that Mr. Khan funded in remote Timbuktu as a Sahara Desert base, an Associated Press investigation found.
Mr. Khan’s trips, dating to at least 1998 when Pakistan first tested a nuclear bomb, have heightened concerns that the scientist might have secretly helped poor, unstable regimes interested in weapons or profits from illicit atomic deals.
At the time of a 1999 visit to Nigeria by Mr. Khan, the country was seeking fuel for a research reactor that China had built for it the same year, according to documents filed with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Still, no public evidence of any Khan nuclear trade, beyond Libya, has emerged in Africa. The Pakistan government and the U.N. nuclear agency investigating his international dealings refused to comment.
Three senior Bush administration officials said the United States is investigating whether Mr. Khan’s network supplied countries other than Libya, North Korea and Iran. Signaling the issue’s sensitivity, the officials spoke on condition of anonymity, refusing to name countries or even continents.
Nations that Mr. Khan visited include Sudan, Mali, Nigeria and Niger, which are significant because all have known or suspected uranium deposits, said Jon Wolfsthal, a former nuclear-weapons adviser to the U.S. Energy Department.
Sudan, a hard-line Islamic regime with links to banned weapons programs, is on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and harbored al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden until 1996.
Trial testimony in al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa said al Qaeda had tried to obtain uranium in Africa.
Niger’s uranium ore — obtained through Libya — helped Pakistan begin its nuclear-weapons program by 1980, giving the Islamic world its first atomic bomb and making Mr. Khan a national hero in Pakistan.
In oil-rich Nigeria, the country’s 1980s-era leaders spoke of building a “Black Bomb” as a counterweight to South Africa, then under white rule despised throughout Africa.
“The two obvious possibilities are [that Mr. Khan] was looking to secure supplies of uranium for Pakistan or to line up potential suppliers for his customers,” said Mr. Wolfsthal, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
The revelations about Mr. Khan’s extensive African travel come after Pakistan confirmed in February that he had supplied weapons technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
Mr. Khan and top lab officials with whom he had traveled have been under house arrest, although Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf pardoned Mr. Khan after he confessed his role.
Libya and South Africa are the only African countries to have acknowledged starting nuclear weapons programs, and both have given them up — Libya only this year under U.S. and British pressure.
The gear that Libya bought through the Khan network included a design for a nuclear warhead, 4,000 centrifuges to separate weapons-grade uranium and canisters of ordinary uranium hexafluoride gas, U.S. officials say.
Beyond Libya and South Africa, “the chances that someone in Africa at least started a nuclear program are fairly high,” said Michael A. Levi, science and technology fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
“If that happened, Khan was almost certainly involved,” Mr. Levi said.
Susan E. Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration, said with the means and motives to seek advanced weapons, “Sudan strikes me as the most worrisome of the lot.”
Officials inside the African governments have denied any weapons involvement with Mr. Khan or wouldn’t comment.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.