Washington, 29 Nov. (AKI) - US diplomatic cables released on Sunday show that since 2007 the United States has been engaged in a secret effort to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistani research reactor. According to the documents released by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, the US administration authorised this effort because American officials feared the material could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device.

One cable quotes Saudi King Abdullah as saying that Pakistani's president Asif Ali Zardari was “the greatest obstacle” to Pakistan’s progress.

“When the head is rotten,” he said, “it affects the whole body”.

In May 2009, US Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported to the State Department that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said: “if the local media got word of the fuel removal they certainly would portray it as the US taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons”.

Cables sent by the US embassy in Islamabad to the US State Department also talk of “grave fears in Washington and London over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme” amid the country’s growing instability.

They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, and “assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in the eastern city of Lahore was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate”.

WikiLeaks, a site devoted to leaking government documents, apparently received hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables from an anti-war activist who got access to the secret files due to a glitch in the computer system.

The US government, however, warned WikiLeaks not to release the documents, which contain a string of embarrassing comments and disclosures about world leaders that are likely to cause a diplomatic uproar. The documents show that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN’s leadership.

The diplomatic cables also talk about a major shift in relations between China and North Korea, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat Al Qaeda in Yemen.