NEW YORK: A retired Pakistani army officer turned businessman has been found guilty of conspiracy and fraud the United States government for trying to import special type of steel for his country’s nuclear facility by making false statement,

A jury in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania State returned the guilty verdict against retired brigadier Inamul-Hag after a five-day trial, rejecting his plea that the steel was required for civilian use in turbines and high speed compressors.

Brig Inam ul Haq will be sentenced on September 22 and till then confined in an apartment in Philadelphia.

He was arrested during what has been described a business trip to Germany last December and extradited to the United States about a month later.

The case goes back to 1986 when Inam ul Haq, who heads the Lahore based ‘multinational incorporated,’ tried to import 10,000 ton of managing steel from a Philadelphia firm through a middleman, Arshad Pervez, a Canadian of Pakistani origin.

According to charges brought against him, he was attempting to obtain the steel for Pakistani nuclear facility in Kahuta by telling the US authorities that the meal was required for high speed compressors and turbines.

At one point during the trial, prosecutor Army Kurland, told the jury that the brigadier’s action could be construed as patriotic on his part but even higher motives could not be used to break the law.

Well known civil rights attorney William Kunstler, who defended the brigadier, said Iman ul Haq was denied speedy trial because the US govt chose not to attempt to extradite him from Pakistan but waited until he visited German on a business trip to have him arrested and utilize that country’s extradition laws. The US government did that despite the fact that the govt of Pakistan had indicated that it would honor its commitments under the US Pakistan extradition treaty. But US never approached Pakistan, he said.

The principal reason advanced by the US govt for bypassing Pakistan’s extradition law, he said, was that it did not have sufficient evidence of guilt to satisfy that country’s laws but that Germany would extradite in the absence of such evidence.

The delay, he said, had an adverse effect on the case because of the media blast about discovery of the Iraqi program to make nuclear weapons. Those stories, he said, prejudiced the minds of jurors.

Article extracted from this publication >> Aug 7, 1992