THE scientists who created Pakistan's programme to acquire enriched plutonium and harness it for military use were trained at British universities.

For the last two decades, as Pakistan strove to match its larger neighbour in the threat stakes, a network of British citizens of Pakistani origin was recruited in the UK and secretly sponsored through university to learn nuclear physics.

Their spymaster, Muhammed Saleem, was a ''clerical officer'' at the Pakistan High Commission in London. His task was to identify potential scientific recruits, fund them, and funnel them back to work for Khan Research Laboratories, Pakistan's covert nuclear research institute.

Saleem was deported after MI5 discovered he had been working quietly in Britain for 21 years, not only in the quest for ethnically sound physicists and engineers, but also buying up equipment with potential nuclear weapons programme applications.

Pakistan protested that Khan Research Laboratories was a legitimate business and not a front for atomic procurement. The protest rang hollow when it was discovered that KRL had since bought 5000 ring magnets, whose only use is in the plutonium enrichment process, in China.