BENAZIR BHUTTO SECRET?

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December in Pakistan. She would be rolling in her grave now, if she knew that, a great secret that she carried to the grave was revealed yesterday in Washington.

And what is this significant secret?

WASHINGTON: Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, on a state visit to North Korea in 1993, smuggled in critical data on uranium enrichment - a route to making a nuclear weapon - to help facilitate a missile deal with Pyongyang, according to a new book by a journalist who knew the slain politician well.

The assertion, reported in The Washington Post, is based on conversations author Shyam Bhatia had with Bhutto in 2003, in which she said she would tell him a secret "so significant that I had to promise never to reveal it, at least not during her lifetime", Bhatia writes in Goodbye, Shahzadi.

A spokesman for the Pakistani embassy in Washington denounced Bhatia's account as "an absurd and baseless claim".

Bhatia said he first met Bhutto at Oxford University in 1974 and kept contact with her until just before her death… theautralian