Pakistan's connections to terrorism have been brought to light countless times, with the most recent being India's Operation Sindoor, a series of precision strikes on 70 terrorists spread across nine terror camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).
With the conflict between the two nations escalating after the precision strikes, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the Director General of Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR)—the media and public relations arm of the Pakistani military—has stepped into the spotlight more, which makes his terrorist connections all the more concerning.
Lt General Chaudhry's father happens to be Mahmood Sultan Bashir-Ud-Din, a nuclear scientist affiliated with Pakistan's nuclear programme (having been conferred the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, Pakistan's third-highest civilian honour, for the same), who was, however, sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for his links to terror outfits, such as Al-Qaeda.
His time at Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) saw him play a key role in the development of Pakistan's nuclear infrastructure, the construction of uranium enrichment plants and the construction of reactors compatible with plutonium, as per an NDTV report.
In the early 2000s, Mahmood co-founded the Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN), which claimed to be an NGO operating in Afghanistan. UTN's affiliations with terror networks was discovered later, as a result of which it was also added to the UNSC's Al-Qaeda sanctions list.
The UNSC sanction report for the UTN, dated April 2011, also mentions that it was during Mahmood's time with the UTN that he frequently met with 9/11 attack mastermind Osama Bin Laden, as well as Mohammed Omar Ghulam Nabi and other Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders to discuss the development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
According to 'The Man from Pakistan: The True Story of the World's Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler', a work of investigative journalism by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Mahmood—a man who believed that Pakistan's nuclear asset was the collective property of the Ummah, a term for the Islamic community across the world—had even met Al-Qaeda in 2001, prior to the 9/11 attacks that made Osama a vicious symbol of terrorism.
Despite Mahmood's son Ahmed rising up the military ranks, rather than the scientific ranks, his role at the once-sanctioned Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DESTO)—a multidisciplinary institution involved in Pakistan's defence research and development—as well as his speculated involvement in orchestrating Pakistan's online misinformation campaign at a time of escalating tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations, raise serious concerns.
