Dead woman tumbles out of Khan closet

Kim was shot at point-blank range, a few yards from Khan’s house, in the neighbourhood known as E-7, a senior police officer said in an interview. Kim previously has been described as the wife of a midranking North Korean diplomat.

But present and former staff members at Khan Research Laboratories, or KRL, the Pakistani scientist’s weapons development facility near Islamabad, say that was a cover story. The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say Kim was part of a 20-member delegation of North Korean engineers and scientists whom Khan had invited to witness Pakistan’s first underground nuclear tests on May 28, 1998, and to learn how to enrich uranium for a North Korean bomb.

There has long been speculation that Kim was killed by her own government because she was suspected of spying for the United States or another Western power. Officials in both Pakistan and India backed that version of events.

A Pakistani official said his country’s intelligence agents suspected that the US was using Kim as a mole inside the North Korean delegation, but that her actions were uncovered by Pakistani and North Korean agents. An Indian official familiar with India’s assessment of the killing said bluntly: ‘‘She was in fact killed by the North Koreans on the grounds that she was in touch with certain Western diplomats.’’

A Pakistani intelligence source said Kim and the rest of the North Korean delegation was staying in a guesthouse in the compound of Khan’s home when Kim was killed.

Even after reports the next year revealed she was probably killed on purpose, few Pakistani officials would talk about it. They said a neighbour’s cook accidentally killed the North Korean woman when he fired a shotgun borrowed from a guard. Another account at the time claimed that one of Khan’s neighbours accidentally killed Kim when his gun fired as he was cleaning it in the garage.

A coroner was not allowed to carry out an autopsy on Kim’s body, and authorities told local police not to open a file on her death.

Khan told The Los Angeles Times in a 1999 interview that Pakistani intelligence services told him that Kim’s death was an accident. ‘‘You Americans always try to put the blame on us,’’ he said.

Three days after she was shot, Kim’s body was spirited out of Pakistan on a chartered Pakistani cargo plane, a source said. The plane, a US-built C-130 military transport, was the same one that Khan recently told investigators he had used to ship plans and equipment for making a nuclear bomb, according to the official, who is familiar with Khan’s signed 12-page confession.

The plane carried Kim’s body back to North Korea along with P-1 and P-2 centrifuges, used to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material, according to the source. The cargo also included drawings, sketches, technical data and depleted uranium hexafluoride gas, which is converted into weapons-grade material in centrifuges, the source said. He added that the aircraft was under the control of his country’s air force.

The Indian official said the charter flight was operated by Shaheen Air International, one of several large corporations run by Pakistan’s military. The company began operating in 1993, and its current chairman is the Air Force Chief of Staff Marshal Kaleem Saadat. Six of its seven directors are retired air force officers.

Pakistan’s foreign office spokesman Masood Khan declined to comment on Kim’s death, or whether the current investigation into Khan and his associates had uncovered any new evidence.

Officially, Kim was married to Kang Thae Yun, who had the title of economic counsellor at North Korea’s embassy in Islamabad. But the US State Department has identified Kang as one of North Korea’s chief arms dealers in the 1990s. Kang worked for North Korea’s state-run Changgwang Sinyong Corp, which the State Department accuses of missile proliferation and imposed sanctions on under US law, several times from 1996 to last year.

Kang was suspected of providing Pakistan advanced missile technology in exchange for plans and equipment to build a nuclear bomb.

Kang left Pakistan a month after Kim’s death. Musharraf became Pakistan’s military chief of staff in 1998, four months after Kim was killed, and he seized power in a bloodless coup in December 1999.

— LAT-WP

(Staff writer Watson reported from New Delhi and Islamabad, and special correspondent Zaidi from Islamabad)