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Pakistan was a major supplier of critical equipment for North Korea's newly revealed clandestine nuclear weapons programme, in return for missiles it could use to counter India's nuclear arsenal, United States intelligence officers were quoted as saying on Friday.
The equipment, which may have included gas centrifuges used to create weapons-grade uranium, appears to have been part of a barter deal beginning in the late 1990s in which North Korea supplied Pakistan with the missiles, the officers told The New York Times.
"What you have here is a perfect meeting of interests. The North Koreans had what the Pakistanis needed, and the Pakistanis had a way for Kim Jong Il to restart a nuclear programme we had stopped," said one officer familiar with the intelligence.
The paper quoted Pakistan embassy spokesman Asad Hayauddin as saying that it was 'absolutely incorrect' to accuse his country of providing nuclear weapons technology to North Korea. "We have never had an accident or leak or any export of missile material or nuclear technology or knowledge," he insisted.
The White House on Thursday told the paper that it would not discuss Pakistan's role or any other intelligence information.
The trade between Pakistan and North Korea appears to have occurred around 1997, roughly two years before General Pervez Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup.
But the relationship appears to have continued after Musharraf became president, and there is some evidence that a commercial relationship extended beyond the September 11 terror attacks on the US, the daily said.
PTI
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