Islamabad, Feb 07: While strongly defending the treatment of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan -the architect of the country's nuclear programme and an icon of national pride - President Pervez Musharraf said this was the only way to escape international censure. ''We found ourselves at a critical juncture ... One way led to the promise of progress and the other to destruction. I chose the former in the larger national interest,'' an emotional Musharraf said.
Based on the findings of an over two-month-long interrogation of about a dozen scientists, Dr. Khan on Wednesday confessed on national television to his involvement in nuclear proliferation to Iran, Libya and North Korea. He also apologised to the nation and asked for Musharraf's clemency.
Musharraf pardoned him on Thursday. He also called Khan a ''national hero, my hero, who unfortunately committed mistakes as the head of an administratively and financially autonomous institution'' tasked with making the nuclear bomb.
Dr. Khan had founded the Kahutta Research Laboratories (KRL), some 55 kilometres east of Islamabad, and headed this uranium enrichment facility until his retirement in 2001.
Musharraf emphatically argued that the interrogation of Khan and some others and their detention was the only way to prove to the world that ''nuclear-proliferation had been committed by individuals, not by the government or the Army”. Bureau Report