Musharraf told of proliferation in 2002: State department

WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (UNI) US secretary of state Colin Powell had taken up with Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf the question of nuclear proliferation as early as October 2002, the state department has said.

Spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters that Powell had a series of discussions with Musharraf in 2002 about proliferation and was given a commitment by the Pakistan leader " not to allow Pakistan to become involved in proliferating activities." The discussions relating to proliferation included the " activities" of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, he said.

As for whether Musharraf had kept the commitment to ensure against proliferation, Boucher said the current investigation by Pakistan " indicates how seriously they take that commitment and how the government of Pakistan is going to try to ensure it is not engaged in any proliferating behavior and ensure that nobody in Pakistan is doing that." Powell did not have immediate plans to visit Pakistan, he said, although he " looks forward to visiting Pakistan sometime." Boucher said the US expected Pakistan to share its investigation results.

" That's important to us, for all of us in the international community, to be able to track down this network and see where it leads and make sure we can follow up and root out the network wherever it exists." Answering a question, he declined to speculate on whether the US would consider sanction against Pakistan.

" I think first we need to see what happened and what the actions of the Pakistani government would be, and I couldn't speculate at this moment." At the White House, spokesman Scott Mcclellan dodged a question about US sanctions on Pakistan for proliferation to countries like north Korea and Iran.

Saying president George W Bush was " acting decisively" to confront the threat posed by proliferation, the spokesman said the nuclear proliferation network headed by Khan " has been broken up by the government of Pakistan." That, he said, was an important step in stopping the spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

" This is a shadowy network that exists.

The investigation continues, there is still more that we are learning.

But we are acting to break up this network once and for all.''