Dubai sends Indian home for ‘selling nuke secrets’

Joint Commissioner of Police, Mumbai, Satya Pal Singh told The Sunday Express that Ahmed will be arrested only after he receives information from his Dubai counterpart. He said: ‘‘That would be possible only in a day or two, till then Akhtar will be questioned by police’’.

Dubai police commander-in-chief Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said Ahmed was a resident of the United Arab Emirates and claimed to have obtained the secrets from his brother who is said to be a nuclear scientist in India.

Ahmed ‘‘had attempted to sell nuclear secrets to the diplomatic missions of a number of brotherly countries in the UAE’’, according to Khaleej Times Online newspaper.

He was taken into custody by Dubai police after they uncovered his attempts to sell secrets of the Indian nuclear programme, it said. The arrest came almost two years after a surveillance operation to find out whether he had worked with a network. The man wanted to sell the secrets to regional states for quite some time, it said.

A computer firm in Dubai owned by a Sri Lankan had earlier been sealed by Dubai police in another instance of an expatriate businessman trying to sell nuclear equipment illegally.