The UN nuclear agency has officially conveyed to Pakistan a request seeking permission for inspection of some of the Pakistani nuclear installations. This follows admission of proliferation of nuclear technology by top Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan to Iran, Libya and North Korea.The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) expects Pakistan to cooperate in the ongoing investigations on nuclear proliferation and illegal nuclear exports, spokesperson and senior information officer Melissa Fleming said in Vienna. ‘‘Firstly, the IAEA has requested Pakistan to provide all possible information on nuclear black market network, most urgently,’’ Fleming was quoted today in the local daily The News as saying.She said ‘‘the IAEA wants to know from Pakistan whether some other countries or non-state actors had been buying nuclear technology as customers of A.Q. Khan’s network’’. Underlining the second expected area of cooperation by the IAEA, she said, ‘‘We want Pakistan to allow the IAEA inspectors visits to the relevant Pakistani nuclear facilities enabling them to take environmental samples wich could help in verifying the Iranian claim that highly enriched uranium (HEU) contaminatin found in Iran originated from Pakistan.’’Asked to identify the channel used to convey the request, Fleming said, it was ‘‘conveyed to the government of Pakistan officially and I would not like to go into further details’’. She declined to reveal the details of Pakistani response to the IAEA request. ‘‘I do not want to go into further details.’’She said Pakistan was cooperating so far with the investigations. ‘‘IAEA chief Dr Mohamed ElBaradei is of the view that Pakistan is cooperating with the IAEA, but the agency wants more cooperaton from Pakistan,’’ she said.Asked for justificaton of asking such cooperation from a country, which is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), she said, ‘‘We know that Pakistan has not signed the NPT, but Pakistan is a member of the IAEA and we have requested Pakistan to ooperate with the IAEA voluntarily’’.Fleming declined to reveal the details of Pakistani response to the IAEA request. ‘‘I do not want to go into further details,’’ was her terse answer.
