"Dr Qadeer has provided Iran with centrifuges but the government of Pakistan had nothing to do with it. He gave them from the black market. Pakistan government was not involved," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told

The first public disclosure that Khan gave Iran centrifuges needed to enrich uranium comes as Washington is mounting pressure on the Muslim country to give up its alleged nuclear weapons programme which Tehran insists is for peaceful purposes.

Washington believes the technology has enabled Iran to enrich uranium to a level required for making nuclear weapons.

The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency has discovered traces of highly enriched uranium in Iran. Iran has said this contamination is from equipment it bought from abroad, with this widely believed to be from Pakistan although Pakistan is not named in IAEA reports on the matter.

The IAEA is still investigating and has not ruled out that the contamination may be from other, even domestic Iranian, sources, although the agency said in a report in November that its "overall assessment" was that "environmental sampling data available to date tends, on balance, to support Iran's statement about the origin of much of the contamination."

IAEA inspectors had in January visited locations outside Iran where centrifuge components had been stored before their shipment to Iran, IAEA deputy director Pierre Goldschmidt said earlier this month, in what was apparently a reference to visits to Pakistan.

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the agency was "well aware that designs and components were provided by the AQ Khan network to Iran." She refused to comment further.

Khan confessed to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya in February 2004 after a government probe into nuclear proliferation.

The investigation was launched in November 2003 after the IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog, informed Pakistan about the leak.

Khan was later pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf, but he has been living under virtual house arrest in Islamabad.

Pakistani leaders have repeatedly vowed they would not allow any foreign country or agency to interrogate the nuclear scientist, who is credited with making Pakistan a nuclear power.

"We have refused direct interrogations by anyone. The reason is national sensitivity," Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said last month at the end of a three-day visit to Tokyo.

Rashid said again Thursday Pakistan would not hand Khan over to any other country.

The United States has said Khan was leader of network of black marketeer spreading nuclear technology to different states.

"This is not a new information. We have said earlier that the illicit transfer of information and technology to Iran came through international black market," a foreign ministry official told AFP.

"A network of these black marketeers was identified and dismantled after thorough investigations," said the official, who could not be named.

The official said they came across the information that Khan had provided "outdated" centrifuges to Iran during his interrogation.

As suspected weapons programs around the world come under scrutiny, Pakistan has said its nuclear proliferation probe has not been closed and it would investigate any new information.

Iran is currently engaged in talks with Britain, France and Germany over demands that Tehran give up uranium enrichment.

EU negotiators want Iran to abandon enrichment as an "objective guarantee" that it is not developing nuclear weapons and are offering in return trade, security and technology rewards -- an offer Iran has so far refused.

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