Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in Bhopal, modern-day India, in 1936 and emigrated to Pakistan in the years following the subcontinent’s violent partition in 1947, a traumatic split that resulted in several wars and decades of animosity between the countries’ military establishments.
Khan immigrated to West Pakistan in 1952, and in 1960 he graduated from the University of Karachi with a degree in metallurgy. Over the next decade he pursued graduate studies abroad, first in West Berlin and then in Delft, Netherlands, where in 1967 he received a master’s degree in metallurgy.
Dr. Khan then began working at Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory, a subcontractor of the Dutch partner of URENCO. URENCO, a consortium of British, German, and Dutch companies, was established in 1971 to research and develop uranium enrichment through the use of ultracentrifuges, which are centrifuges that operate at extremely high speeds.
In 1972. In 1972 he earned a doctorate in metallurgical engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Meanwhile, in 1964 he married Hendrina Reterink, a British national who had been born to Dutch expatriate parents in South Africa and raised in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) before moving to the Netherlands, according to Britannica.
Khan returned to Pakistan in 1975 and set up the country’s first nuclear facility, later named the Khan Research Laboratory due to his pivotal work in helping the country obtain its first atomic weapons.
Khan was worth some $400 million at one point. With his clandestine income, Khan became a multimillionaire who collected vintage cars and foreign properties. Outside his mansion in Islamabad, he had a jasmine bush trimmed into the shape of a mushroom cloud.
On May 30, 2008 Khan said that his 2004 televised confession was a lie and that he had been pressured by Musharraf into making it. The same year, according to the Associated Press, the Pakistani government ordered Khan not to discuss nuclear weapons technology with anyone, including his family.
In 2006 Khan was struck with prostate cancer but recovered after surgery.
A court ended his house arrest in February 2009, but Khan’s movements were strictly guarded, and he was accompanied by authorities every time he left his home in Islamabad.
Further to his research and development in nuclear science, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan has made rich contributions in morphology and material physics.
He is the only person in Pakistan to have been awarded the country’s highest civilian award, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, twice. Reportedly speaks many languages, including Dutch, German, English, Urdu and Hindi, as well as basic French and Persian.
