‘Jilted lover saved Pakistan's nuke programme from sabotage’

While many people take credit for saving our nuclear programme, no one actually knows how an unsung jilted girl had actually ended up saving Pakistan’s nuclear project out of sheer vengeance.

An “unsung jilted” lover saved Pakistan’s nuclear programme from a major “sabotage” three-decade back after a whirlwind romance with a nuclear scientist who was jailed by Benazir Bhutto and military ruler Pervez Musharraf, a top former ISI official has revealed.

The woman lecturer, who felt betrayed after a romance with a nuclear scientist of the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP), gave the lead to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in 1978, which in turn led to the dramatic arrest of 12 Pakistani scientists and engineers, planning to sabotage the country’s nuclear sites, claims Brig (retd) Imtiaz Ahmed, the then head of the spy agency in Sindh. “The expose led to the arrest of Pakistani scientists who were later given death and life imprisonment sentences by the special tribunal set up by the then president General Ziaul Haq,”

The News daily reported on Thursday. “While many people take credit for saving our nuclear programme, no one actually knows how an unsung jilted girl had actually ended up saving Pakistan’s nuclear project out of sheer vengeance,” Ahmed, who broke his silence of over 30 years, was quoted as saying by the Pakistani daily.

Recalling the event, the former ISI officer of ‘Operation Midnight Jackals’ fame, said he had first met the lecturer of a Karachi Memon family while she was undergoing treatment for “secret concealment”, a disease wherein a patient could not be cured unless he or she shared a secret kept with her. Later when the credential of Rafique Munshi, an engineer with KANUPP came under suspicion, Brigadier Ahmed, who served as director-in-charge of Internal Security ISI for many years, again traced the lecturer after he came to know that woman was linked to the scientist. Though the woman felt “cheated” by Munshi she was still dating the nuclear engineer. She led the ISI officer to Munshi’s secret safe and official files related to Pakistan’s nuclear sites along with “piles of dollars”.