PAKISTAN: Pakistan's nuclear proliferation scandal refuses to go away over a year after its leading atomic scientist AQ Khan confessed to selling sensitive nuclear secrets and technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
The matter is likely to be raised during US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's day stopover in Islamabad today as part of her Asian trip that includes visits to India, Afghanistan, China and Japan.
However, US officials said Washington needed Islamabad's co-operation in its war against terror, and was "satisfied" with its investigations into Dr Khan's activities.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei had declared Dr Khan's proliferation activities a "nuclear Walmart", and has been demanding further investigations into the affair, albeit with little progress.
US media reports have claimed that Dr Khan's co-operation in providing information on Iran's nuclear programme is the "price" being extracted by the US for letting Pakistan off lightly in the scandal.
Revered as the "father" of Pakistan's and Islam's nuclear bomb, the western-educated Dr Khan has been under house arrest since his public confession on television last year.
Pakistan recently admitted for the first time that Dr Khan had supplied Iran with centrifuges used to produce enriched uranium needed to building an atomic bomb.
However, it later denied reports that it had agreed to hand over used centrifuge components to the IAEA to help determine whether Iran's atomic programme is geared to producing weapons, as Washington claims, or is entirely peaceful, as Tehran asserts.